Taking Chat From Conversation To Resolution
There seems to be a lot of buzz around AI and Machine Learning at the moment. But when customers ask me what ServiceNow is doing with AI, my question back to them is what use-cases would they like us to solve? The main themes are centered around 2 use-cases:
- Making customer service better
- Offload repetitive work from agents
Customer Service today, whether it’s serving external customers or your internal user-base, has some challenges. Many companies have enabled self-service, allowing users to solve issues themselves, typically through a Service Portal.
But when a user needs help, they will probably start by searching for a solution. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they'll always find the answer they are looking for. For an example scenario, a user has a cracked screen and types ‘Help, I broke my screen’ into the search bar. They could easily be presented with a number of options including User-Manual, Support Forum, FAQ and many more. None of these options are a quick fix. So the user then selects the ‘Get Help’ option which takes them to a form full of fields to fill in; Name, Age, Email, Address, Mother’s Maiden Name, First Pet and many more fields which (in 2018) should either already be known by the system they’re logged into, or irrelevant.
Self-Service Today
What if there was a simpler way? What if they were simply presented with one question: HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?
With ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent, that’s exactly what the user is going to get. A conversational UI (chat) across multiple platforms that asks the user what they need. No lists, no forms, just tell the Virtual Agent what you need. Sounds great, right? Sounds too good to be true? I’ll be honest, I thought so too initially, until I saw it in action. In my Product Management role, I’ve been lucky enough to see this new feature from its early concept (when we initially acquired Qlue) right through to the product launch in our upcoming London Release (which will soon be available to all users).
Out Of Box, we’re shipping a number of conversations which are pre-built into the platform. Really simple use-cases like ‘Search Knowledgebase’ and ‘Show me the status of my open tickets’. These requests are serviced automatically by the Virtual Agent, with no human interaction. Because the information is on an integrated platform, it’s a seamless immediate response.
Virtual Agent Conversation Designer
But the really cool bit about this product is the Conversation Designer. A dream for a System Admin; no-code designer with a simple clean UI that allows an administrator to design and build a conversation flow. No coding required, there's a canvas in the middle of the screen which has 2 columns; on the left are the components of the conversation workflow and on the right are the properties of these components. I've used it on my demo instance to build out conversations and it's really intuitive and easy to use.
Once your conversation is built, you can then publish to multiple channels. Yes, that’s right. This Virtual Agent doesn’t just live in the desktop browser, it’s available on mobile and 3rd party collaboration tools. Because… Users don’t always live inside the desktop browser. We did some research and found out many users were collaborating today on channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams. So we built an easy integration with these channels and enable our users to chat to the ServiceNow Virtual Agent in exactly the same messaging channels that they’re already speaking to their colleagues and co-workers.
Using Virtual Agent in Slack
Virtual Agent will be available in our London release, coming soon. Initially, it will be available on desktop, mobile, Slack and MS Teams. On our roadmap, we're building an integration with Facebook Workplace. If there are any other channels you'd like to see us work with, then tell us! We will prioritise our product investments based on user demand.
In the mean-time, if you've got any questions, don't hesitate to contact me.
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