Once you activate the Virtual Agent plugins, it's not complicated to design your conversational experience. Navigate to Conversational Interfaces, and you see all the components you need to create your own conversational experiences. Within minutes, you can create topics, use workflows, and train your Virtual Agent on understanding natural language.
But is that enough to convince people to interact with the Virtual Agent? And when they do, will they have a positive experience and return to it? Or will they return to their old habits and never return to the Virtual Agent?
Similar to the importance of UX design to your portal and website's success, Conversation Design is a crucial factor in the success of your investment in building a virtual agent.
Proper conversation design helps you create a better Virtual Agent. It turns the experience from something that works functionally but can be frustrating to something people enjoy interacting with. But what does conversation design entail, and why is it different from traditional web or app design?
Here's the thing, in a conversational interface, people can say and do whatever they want at any given moment. This makes it complicated. On the one hand, you want to make sure the Virtual Agent understands what people ask. On the other hand, you also want it to respond in a way that makes people feel understood.
Think about it this way, if you have a robot and a human speaking to each other, then the situation becomes that one of them has an artificial brain, and the other has a biological brain. If we want to have a proper conversation between the two, we should understand both artificial and biological brains and their synergies.
Therefore when designing conversations, you want a workflow that unifies technology, psychology, and language elements. Only then do you truly get to the point where the Virtual Agent can have human-centric conversations that help people achieve their goals. This is the key to unlocking the potential of ServiceNow's Virtual Agent technology.
In this Virtual Agent Academy session, Hans van Dam, CEO at Conversation Design Institute, discusses the proven workflow that helps companies around the world create human-centric chatbots. You will learn the critical steps in the workflow and get the tips and tricks to help you in your next project. During this presentation, Hans will zoom in on the example of a performance review to show what kind of design standards you can use to make your Virtual Agent more successful.
