Microsoft Teams Virtual Agent - How to Add "Start New Chat" / "End Chat" Button Similar to Portal

[Rahul63]

Hello Experts,

We have ServiceNow Virtual Agent integrated with Microsoft Teams.

In the Service Portal Virtual Agent experience, users have the option to start a new conversation at any time (for example, a "Start New Chat" or end conversation capability). However, when interacting with the same Virtual Agent through Microsoft Teams, we do not see any similar option we only have (Hi, bye, restart commands). The Teams chat continues within the same conversation thread, and users do not have a clear way to start a fresh conversation. 

We are looking to understand the following:

1. Is there any out-of-the-box functionality in Microsoft Teams Virtual Agent that allows users to:

   • Start a new chat/conversation
   • End the current chat
   • Display a "+" icon or button to restart the conversation

2. If this is not supported OOTB, has anyone implemented a custom solution?

   • Custom button
   • Quick action
   • Adaptive Card action
   • UI Action equivalent for Teams
   • Virtual Agent topic that resets/restarts the conversation

3. Is it possible to create a custom "Start Over", "End conversation" button that redirects users to the Greeting Topic or initiates a completely new conversation session?

4. Are there any ServiceNow documents, KB articles, or best practices that explain the limitations and supported capabilities of conversation restart functionality within Microsoft Teams? The official documentation indicates that Teams uses a persistent chat experience that differs from the Service Portal experience.

   

We would appreciate hearing how others have addressed this requirement.

Thank you in advance for your guidance.

[Chris D]

No, it's definitely not OOTB and no, we've not bothered to try doing anything custom for it. At that point, you'd be talking about a completely custom Teams app + UI that somehow either embeds the native VA integration or otherwise implements it further custom(ly?) via API, neither of which seem remotely worth the effort to avoid users tying seven letters ("restart") or just waiting an hour or whatever the inactivity timeout is for their chat to auto-close.

If this is so much of a concern for your org, I would recommend the simplest route is updating the wording on your greetings and fallback topics (you can dynamically script it so it only appears for Teams users) to make it clear that if they want to start a new conversation, they can simply type "restart" at any time.