How the Virtual Agent can Help Us with Emergency Response Situations

[dangrady510]

In rapidly changing and uncertain emergency situations, it is important to keep everyone informed as we anticipate and respond as things unfold.

As a response to COVID-19, many organizations have asked their employees to work from home(or remotely).

There are many of us that are comfortable working from home, but for others this may be an unexpected and first-time experience.

For both WFH veterans and rookies, it is important for organizations to take advantage of all the channels at our disposal to effectively communicate, enable people to get the answers they need quickly, minimize disruption, and empower employees and customers to remain engaged and productive.

It's difficult to predict where employees will look for information, and organizations can quickly be inundated with support calls, emails, etc.  Most organizations are not equipped with the resources to handle a sudden increase in volume of this scale.

ServiceNow customers can quickly and seamlessly deploy Virtual Agent as a vital part of their emergency response strategy to augment and improve human agent's response efforts by:

• Helping to communicate updates
• Handling larger volumes of support traffic so that human agents are freed up to handle more complex and higher priority situations.
• Assist in routing requests to the individual most equipped to handle and streamline the path to resolution
• Gather important information to provide context and keep everyone informed and connected.

Many of us may be using the Virtual Agent in an emergency response situation for the first time, and I thought it would be helpful to share some ideas/thoughts as well as provide a forum(the comments section below) for ServiceNow customers to collaborate with each other.

• Let everyone know how to find the Virtual Agent - In emergency response situations, one of the best practices is frequent and consistent communication.  As part of these communications make sure you educate employees about the availability of the Virtual Agent, where to find it, and the types of things it will be able to assist them with.
• Update conversations as the situation evolves - Assign someone to keep conversations up to date.  Sometimes when we think AI we think self-learning magic.  That's not 100% the case.  And in fact past emergency situations don't always give us a lot of historical information for the machine to learn from.  Having the ability to quickly adjust and author conversations that communicate and direct employees to accurate information about the current situation is key.  One example might be using the Virtual Agent greeting topic that gets included at the beginning of all conversations to point people to the current Corporate COVID-19 guidelines as well as updated FAQ information about Work from Home connectivity and productivity tools.

Or present the employee with the most commonly viewed Knowledge articles for popular WFH tools.

• Guide employees to troubleshoot on their own - You can use the Virtual Agent to help employees become their own support agent by offering inline step by step troubleshooting instructions for common WFH tools.

• Leverage multiple conversational interfaces(if available) - Anticipate an increase in the use of collaborative messaging applications like MS Teams and Slack and make sure the Virtual Agent is available where they are interacting.  Take advantage of the prebuilt integrations ServiceNow provides to allow you to author the conversations once and expose them in those other channels to further scale the communication and service efforts.

• Use Virtual Agent to gather information and kickoff workflows - Too often people think of conversational interfaces as just a means to provide information.  The reality is that you can use conversational interfaces like the Virtual Agent to create better information gathering experiences, and more importantly as part of the ServiceNow platform kickoff workflows or orchestrations that help automate the fulfillment of work.  For example, let's think about how the Virtual Agent could augment the recently released Emergency Self Report or Emergency Outreach applications.  We could use the Virtual Agent to allow employees to check in and update their health status.

Or allow managers to check in on the current status of their team members.

• Virtual Agent will not be able to address every situation - no bot is perfect, nor will it be able to respond to every situation.  Offer the ability to transfer to a live agent when appropriate.  Try to use specific prompts within conversations to transfer employees to the correct resources to address  specific issues to streamline resolution paths.

The well-being of an organizations employees is the #1 priority in emergency situations.  Keeping them safe and informed is paramount.  Secondarily(or in parallel), keeping employees enabled, engaged, and productive allows them to continue to communicate and provide service to those outside the organization.  Together, this allows us to keep moving forward even in emergency and challenging situations.  Virtual Agent is there to partner with on both of those initiatives.  

If you are using the Virtual Agent in your own organization to help better service your employees, customers, business partners, citizens in this challenging time please share how below.

Other Virtual Agent Posts you may find valuable:

Even Virtual Agents are Working from Home

Furloughing Employees - Managing difficult times during a crisis with empathy

Democratizing the Chatbot: Fastest Path to Value(this one has an authoring video)

Digital Ensemble that creates great Virtual Agent experiences

Is “Chatbot” a misnomer? Let’s think about what creates a successful chat experience