What’s New in Madrid for Virtual Agent?

[Adi Subbarao]

The Madrid release of Virtual Agent is here, and it includes several new and exciting features that benefit both developers and non-coders. These features introduce a better user experience, enhanced productivity, and increased accessibility for each of our customers using Virtual Agent. If there is any specific topic or feature you would like to see covered in more depth, please leave a comment on this post.

Overview of new Madrid features to explore:

• Workplace by Facebook Integration
• Additional Conversational Templates
• No Code/Low Code Editors
• Enhanced Data Cards
• Virtual Agent Dashboard

ServiceNow Chatbots on Workplace by Facebook!          

In addition to supporting Virtual Agent on the Service Portal, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, we’re thrilled to allow customers to deploy enterprise chatbots on Workplace by Facebook.

Developers and administrators will now be able to create conversational workflows and improve customer and employee productivity within Workplace.

The out-of-the-box conversation topics and the ability to transfer to a live agent will also be available using Workplace. We look forward to seeing more chatbots servicing customers and employees on this new messaging channel.

More conversation templates to choose from!

With Madrid, we have expanded our pre-defined collection of conversation templates to include Tier 2 support tasks such as FAQs, tutorials, status updates, incident/case creation, diagnostics, feedback surveys, and more. These templates are included out-of-the-box for you to quickly create chatbots in the Virtual Agent Designer.

Here are a few topics you can now choose from:

New Topics:

Resolve Incident -	Assign a technician an incident to be resolved through chat
Update Change Request -	Update information on a change request
Identify Planned Changes -	View and access planned changes for a given configuration item (CI)
Identify Open Change Window -	View and access open change windows for a given CI
Create Problem -	Create a problem record
Escalate IT Ticket -	Take action to escalate an IT Ticket you opened

Whether you are an experienced coder or a non-technical individual contributor, these new topics will extend your enterprise chatbot capabilities across all IT, HR, and customer service workflows.

Build, test, and update chatbots with less code!

To make chatbot development a breeze, we’re enabling customers to quickly build logic and make changes to their chatbots. Our new editor experience designer experience allows admins to do string substitutions, build conditional logic, and perform lookup, insert, and update queries without any code. Now, in a matter of a few clicks, you can build, test, and update bots without spending much time or development resources.

New Look and Feel with Enhanced Data Cards!

We’re giving Virtual Agent a new look and feel using a more responsive design. Customers can now create data cards to appear natively within chat conversations.

   

These enhanced data cards offer a more visually appealing and condensed way to see real-time ServiceNow data records. This ultimately enhances the Virtual Agent user experience and allows users to interact in the native card formats for Service Portal, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace.

     

Slack enhancements:

Virtual Agent now supports the Slack Enterprise Grid (https://slack.com/enterprise).

Teams enhancements:

Virtual Agent now supports rendering of date/time in calendar format and single select in dropdown format.

Built-in Chat Analytics and Reporting

We are excited to roll out a new Virtual Agent dashboard for Performance Analytics. This allows customers to collect real-time insights on the Virtual Agent interactions taking place across all workflows.

This dashboard comes equipped with out-of-the box widgets to measure common KPIs and performance data such as the most used conversation topics, % of cases resolved/deflected, user feedback, and comments.

With the power of analytics built into Virtual Agent, we expect customers to implement best practices and consistently improve their chatbot performance.

We’re looking forward to getting these enhancements into your hands and hearing your feedback, so start planning those Madrid upgrades today! As always, be sure to check the release notes for a full list of changes to Virtual Agent.

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