Publishing Virtual Agent Conversations

[Heath Ramsey]

Step 2: Publishing Virtual Agent Conversations

In the Activating the Virtual Agent and NLU Plugins article, you configured your ServiceNow instance to have Virtual Agent capabilities. All of the components have been installed that are needed to run Virtual Agent. Now it is time to set up the conversations that will be supported by your new Virtual Agent.

Before publishing a conversation... set up your greetings and promoted topics!

The first thing your user sees will be the greeting, so make it a personalized one! The greetings and other Setup topics can be configured in Conversational Interfaces Home Page. Navigate to Conversational Interfaces > Settings > Virtual Agent > Custom Greetings and Setup. Click into the "Default chat experience" record, which will control the greetings behavior for your Virtual Agent. 

Here you can select to use a different Greetings topic besides the default. You can also change the Fallback topic to use the Search Fallback topic so that user utterances without a topic automatically return search results. Finally, you can click the "Promoted Topics" tab to add a 'pinned' topic to your greeting for easy access for your users.  

Tip: The ITSM Virtual Agent Conversations store app contains the "Dynamic Greeting" topic. This greetings topic is recommended as it addresses the user by name and provides outage and user ticket information directly in the greeting. Try it out!

If you have AI Search enabled on your instance, then be sure to add the "AI Search - Fallback" topic as a setup topic for better search results. 

1. Open Virtual Agent Designer

When the conversations were installed by the plugins, they become available in the Virtual Agent Designer. To open the VA Designer, navigate to Virtual Agent > Designer in the left-hand navigation pane. You will see all conversations (topics) that have been installed. 

• Active Conversations are the conversations that are "live" to users. After the plugins have been installed, the only active conversations are the Setup topics.
• Inactive Conversations are conversations that have been installed or created but are not available in the Virtual Agent. They require the Virtual Agent admin to publish them before they will be used in Virtual Agent interactions with users.

NOTE: The VA Designer has drop-down filters you can use to filter the number of conversations that appear. You can also use the VA Designer to test the active conversations. Just click on the Test Active Topics button in the upper-right corner.

2. Activate Desired Conversations

In order to activate a conversation, you need to click on the conversation tile itself. This will take you to a detailed view of the conversation where you can learn more about it. For example, after installing the ITSM Virtual Agent conversations click on the Open IT Ticket 2.0 (template) tile. The screenshot below shows what the detailed information for this conversation looks like, and important items from the page are described below. (Click on the image to see a larger version)

Keywords	The items in the Keywords box are words the Virtual Agent looks for from the user to start the specific conversation. In the example of Open IT Ticket, when a user inputs any of the 8 terms in the field (create, open, incident, etc.) the Virtual Agent will start the topic flow for the conversation. When this field is present, it means Virtual Agent is using the keyword version of interaction. When you see Keywords on the form, the Virtual Agent is NOT using NLU to process the inputs from the user.
Categories	The Categories field is used to put conversations into logical groupings that can be used to sort through the drop-down filters on the main Topic Designer page.
Roles	The Roles field allows you to specify the specific roles require to interact with the conversation. If no roles are specified, the conversation is available to everyone.

NOTE: Even though you have the option to edit this conversation, you should not edit it directly. To modify out-of-box conversations, make a duplicate first and then edit it. This ensures you always have a working topic you can revert back to.

3. Test The Conversation via Designer

Once you have activated the conversation(s), return to the main Virtual Agent Designer page. You should now see that all of the conversations that you turned on show the Active status. You can now run the active conversations to make sure they are working as you intended them. To do so, click on the Test Active Topics button in the upper-right area of the Virtual Agent Designer. A sample conversation in the designer shows the basic conversation flow. (Click on the image to see a larger version)

Setup Topics (Greetings Conversation) The conversation starts with the Virtual Agent prompting the user for input. The greeting is configured in the Custom Greetings & Setup page.

User Input/Keyword Match The conversation continues with the user inputting a request, which is then matched against the available keywords across active conversations. In this case, the keyword matches take the Virtual Agent into the Open IT Ticket conversation flow.

Conversation Flow The remainder of the conversation is defined within the Open IT Ticket conversation flow. In this case, the additional user text is used as input to find potential articles in the knowledge base that might resolve the issue.

NOTE: While you might be working in the VA Designer as you run the conversation, be aware that you are interacting with the Virtual Agent Runtime Engine. If running a topic like "Open IT Ticket", records will actually be created in the instance. Be aware of the impact you might have on your organization's processes and services when you are running these active conversations from the Designer.

4. Test The Conversation, via Service Portal/Employee Center

At this point, the conversation has only been tested by the designer. You still need to make sure the conversation functions in the portal the way you expect. In Step 1, you may have specified roles that restrict who can interact with the conversation. You need to be certain the topic(s) are only available to the intended users. (Click on the image to see a larger version) To add the Virtual Agent to the Service Portal, view the documentation here. 

1. Access The Portal The first step is to access the portal as a user that should be able to see the conversation. This can be done by either impersonating the user or getting a user to authenticate to the portal to perform the test. Verify the intended user is the person authenticated to the portal. Then click on the Virtual Agent.
2. Access All Available Topics After accessing the Virtual Agent, the user can see all topics that are available by clicking on the Show Me Everything button in the window.
3. Verify Published Topic In the list of topics that are shown, verify that the topic that was published in the previous steps now appears in the list for the authenticated user. In this example, the Open IT Ticket is the conversation that was published, and it can be seen in the list of available topics for this user.

By following the steps in this article, you have successfully published a conversation through Virtual Agent! But we still have one more step to go to take full advantage of the capabilities and power of the ServiceNow Virtual Agent. You are ready to configure conversations to use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to drive an even better user experience!

[Amir Khan4]

Good one