Virtual Agent answering FAQs

[Kotoyo]

Hi All. I would like to know what kind of configurations we can think of in order to have Virtual Agent answer FAQs. I want VA to automatically answer the user's inquiry by referring the FAQ data.

I can think of one approach: to create the "Topic" one by one for each FAQ topic with Virtual Agent Designer and to let VA to answer the inquiry following by the designed workflow; however, it seems not a fascinating option from the maintenance point of view. It would be great if the Virtual Agent refer the Knowledge articles on Service Portal and automatically generate the answers but I don't know if it is possible.

Fully appreciated if you share your comments or thoughts!

[Nicole45]

This is definitely something I'd also like the VA to do...for any knowledge article. FAQs is a great use case. I'll be interested to hear the answer!

[Kotoyo]

Thank you Nicole for your supporting comment 🙂

[Chris D]

Sadly, I don't think Virtual Agent is designed to handle something like this too well.

Like you said, the ideal way to implement this in ServiceNow's VA would be to create a topic for each question. This is best for the end user since they just type in what and the ensuing "topic" doesn't even seem like a conversation to them - it's just a response with no additional input. Also as you said, this is a development/maintenance nightmare - it's not hard to create simple topics but I'm cringing at creating, say, 20+ topics that will all just contain a single response or two and then having to update these later down the road.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is doing one topic ("Search FAQs" maybe?) to cover these FAQs; this will make for a significantly worse user experience since they have to know to start this topic just to ask their question, but it would make development/maintenance significantly easier.
If you go this route, your best bet is to use Knowledge Management as your repository and then you'd essentially be using the OOTB "Search Knowledge Base" topic as your base, taking user input as a dynamic search and returning the KB results. If you have concise FAQ answers, the answer might even (partially) appear in the VA results, but odds are they'd have to click the link to see the whole article - another reason it's not a great customer experience.

Finally, I suppose a third option could be in between, where if you can lump your FAQs together into logical groupings (i.e. HR FAQs, IT FAQs, etc), you could create a handful of separate topics for those and embed your FAQs in those, whether including a search and/or perhaps a reference lookup (say, KB Articles filtered on the respective Knowledge Category). The easiest development thing to do would be to direct the user to a KB article but this also gives you a little flexibility on being able to displaying some FAQ answers right in the conversation, say, if you display the top 5 FAQs as a static choice up front and then offer a search option if none of those apply.

[Kotoyo]

Hi Chris. Many thanks for your detailed suggestions! It helped me a lot to think about the VA configuration. As you suggest, I think the third option is realistic.