Employee center unification and Virtual agent

[David Bembridge]

With a single unified multi-department employee center approach, we have found that this should provide the best overall employee experience.  However we have found that Virtual agent implementation has to be considered.  In a situation where 2 or more departments/SP portals are merging into one combined EC pro portal, the VA capability is no longer portal/department specific, VA now becomes unified with EC.   Here are 3 example departments in different positions with VA that are moving to unified EC portal:

Department1 - Mature with lots of VA topics defined and agent chat.
Department2 - Basic VA topics defined, no live chat option.

Department3 - No desire or plans to adopt VA

With unification, virtual agent/chat icon is available to all employees on EC homepage (esc), NOW mobile app and EC via the MS Teams app. All contact methods for unified EC are getting traffic from employees that may need to engage any of the departments products, knowledge, services or communications.  Here are some example scenarios that need to overcome with VA redesign:

1. Employee lands on EC homepage needing a service from Department3 but clicks on VA/chat.  How is it best to defer them to that departments taxonomy/catalog for their services because they are not live with VA. 

2. Employee lands on NOW mobile app needing service from department 2, employee wants to chat to someone and triggers the VA fallback topic for agent chat, but they are talking to department1 that cannot help.

3. Employee lands on EC homepage and searches (via AI search) for a KB article that has been published by department2, but the search returns a VA bot response with similar terminilogy that is for something else to do with department1.

Keen to hear if others have overcome these challenges.   I would be interested in best practices or learn from other implementations/customer experiences that have already implemented unifed EC with VA.

[Loudigi]

🖐Same issue. We're actively discussing how best to manage this. So far, we plan to go with a custom greeting topic that will ask the user which department to route to, if not we'll ask a series of questions to determine the best direction. It won't be ideal, but we need the most "sure" way to get the user in the right path. The departments will have to agree on the unified branding of the VA.

[Daichi Ishikawa]

@David Bembridge 

We are facing on same challenge and are just considering how we do. As @Loudigi  said, asking a series of questions to determine the best direction will help us solve this challenge.

Does anyone has an idea to solve this challenge??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thank you!!

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I'm trying to use promoted topics  for asking IT and HR as an article below:

[Now Community] Employee Center Academy: Multi-department, Unified Virtual Agent - July 20 RECORDING
https://www.servicenow.com/community/employee-center-events/employee-center-academy-multi-department...