Calling UK users of Virtual Agent

Ken Cree · ‎09-12-2024

Hi all.

I work within the UK Higher Education sector and I’m looking to connect with other users of Virtual Agent (specifically ITSM Pro users) to share the successes and challenges we have encountered.

Areas I’m keen to discuss are topic setup and any links to Live Agent or 3rd party services (Teams, Slack, WhatsApp etc), as well as any plans or implementations of LLMs or Automation.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Thanks

Aly Skidmore1 · ‎09-24-2024

Hi folks - happy to help organise a session on this if there's enough of us client-side who'd like a "warts and all" discussion and experience share. We have VA integrated with Teams and live agent chat. We have also configured a separate channel for specific, urgent app support for front office trading. We've integrated VA with powershell scripted self-heal capabilities on laptops (nothing earth shattering but it's a start).

Like many of you we have found the OOTB conversations, NLU and product documentation to be a bit touch and go and have had to put a great deal of development effort and investment to get to where we are now.

We've found the Impact accelerators to be very helpful (for those on Impact guided or above).

Now starting to scale back and concentrate on other aspects of the platform that will help improve VA conversation quality - underlying data/ quality of analyst updates/ KA content and EC design.

The reality is that OOTB VA is facing into a world of user expectation that it can't meet due to advances in GenAI worldwide. Retro fitting it into platforms that have existed for a few years also makes the ROI tricky to realise.

We have a user group who we engage on the VA roadmap - I'd say about 10% of their suggestions are for VA - which speaks volumes! We have now opened up the discussion to the broader subject of both the digital and human interfaces to service,

If there's appetite for a one-off, or even a series of sessions on this then I'm sure this is something the SNUG team could help facilitate.

Cheers, Aly

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PaulTaylorIOSP · ‎09-12-2024

Ken

I would be happy to connect and talk further.

We are at the beginning of our ServiceNow journey, having gone live with phase 1 of ITSM and ITOM last month.

We had teams integration and the Virtual agent as a core element of our commitment to improve user experience, but out of the box, the product has been a little underwhelming. As such we have added this as an improvement initiative within CIM.

Would be good to understand yours (and hopefully others) experience of the virtual agent and understand what levels of user adoption have been achieved and what level of value more mature ServiceNow owners feel they have got from the product.

Webbs78 · ‎09-12-2024

Hi Paul,

What kinds of things with the teams integration and the Virtual agent did you find underwhelming please? I'm curious to understand more as am likely to embark on a similar journey in our org soon too.

Matt Cronin · ‎09-12-2024

We have been using the Virtual Agent a while now. Like @PaulTaylorIOSP I find it generally a little underwhelming, though we are getting a lot of use for it as a means for people to contact/chat with our ServiceDesk - this seems to be the primary use-case.

The problem we have is largely due to the sucess of our internal GPT client, and people's expectations that VA will do the same. Linking them up is something we are keen to explore, but I think the costs of NowAssist to enable that, may be prohibitive in the short-term.

We are continually looking for new conversations (mostly the OOTB ones) to try out, as well as considering some more custom-built ones (although we shy away from customising where possible).

Always happy to discuss our experiences...

Ken Cree · ‎09-17-2024

Hi @Matt Cronin we are in a similar position with a lot of users finding ways to bypass it and get straight through to our Service Desk.

We definitely had some early adoption issues as we launched at a time when ChatGPT and similar products were making a splash so our VA seemed very underwhelming since it could only answer a set of specific issues but mainly either filled in catalog items or directed our users to the correct self-service form to fill in.

One of our issues has been our fallback when the NLU model does not get a match. We show the top 3 hits on catalog items and KBA's but quite often the KBA's show more prominently. If anyone has found a good workaround to this I'd be very interested.

We are slightly different regarding our topics as we have built the vast majority of them using the Designer. We have used some OOTB ones (Request Catalog Item, Check IT Ticket). Mostly it's been smooth sailing with upgrades, only the NLU model caused us some issues but nothing major so far 🤞.

We've configured out VA to be in Teams and are creating a bunch more topics for each area before we push another launch.