Now Assist Virtual Agent – Modify topic

[Max Selwyn]

Virtual Agent can route conversations to live agents, but without smart triage, you'll get IT issues mixed with HR requests in the same queue—creating bottlenecks and poor user experience. This guide shows you how to add intelligent routing logic. 

This is a step-by-step guide to copy and modify the Now Assist Live Agent LLM topic in Virtual Agent to add conditional logic that prompts the user for a check before routing to a live agent. In this example, we'll prompt the user to confirm whether their issue is IT or HR, then route IT issues to a live agent and send HR issues to the provided email instead. 

Step 1.  

1. Open Virtual Agent designer 

Step 2.  

1. Ensure you select Now Assit in Virtual Agent in the dropdown menu 
2. Ensure “LLM” is selected in the toggle, not “NLU/keyword” 
3. Search for “live” 
4. Open the “Now Assist Live Agent” topic  

Step 3.  

1. In the top right, select the menu and duplicate the topic to leave the OOB topic as is. 
2. Give your new topic a meaningful name to distinguish from the OOB topic. 

Step 4.  

1. Under the “Decision” node there are two options “other” and “CEA Request” 
2. “Other” is for native, e.g. non-teams/copilot user sessions 
3. Beneath the “other” node, drag the “static choice” LLM-enabled user input to the flow 
4. Populate the Node Name, Detail description and Choices as in the screenshot 
5. Optionally, instead of having the LLM decide the verbiage, you can put your desired prompt in the “enforce user prompt” section 

Step 5.  

1. Drag the “decision” node under the input created in step 4. 
2. Click the blue plus below to add another path option. 
3.  
4. Click the “always” above the connect to agent path 
5. In the right pane, branch properties, click “add condition” 
6. In the dropdown select your input node, in my example “Confirm IT Or HR” and select “is” then “Yes,IT Issue” 
7.  
8. Select save, then in the branch properties rename it from “always” to “IT issue” 
9. In the other path, rename from “always” to “HR Issue” and change the condition to be the other option from Step F.  
10.  
11. Under the HR Issue path, drag the arrow to the “soft end conversation” node 
12.  

Step 6. 

1. Save your topic and then select Test 
2. Test each option you created 
3.  
4. IT option path should lead to live agent  
5.  
6. HR issue option should end the conversation 
7.  
8. Once satisfied, exit the test and Publish the topic 

Step 7.  

1. Navigate to conversational interfaces -> Assistant designer and select “edit” on your assistant, in this case it is most likely going to be “Now Assist for Virtual Agent” 
2.  
3. Navigate to the settings tab, select “chat experience” then “fallback” 
4.  
5. Toggle live agent (if not already active), and select your new topic 
6.  
7. Make sure to save your changes! 

Step 8.  

1. Navigate to your portal and test your new topic 
2.  

Views expressed are my own and do not represent ServiceNow, my team, partners, or customers.