Hi all,
I'm hoping to get some feedback on how people have laid out their Virtual Agent topics and advice on what the ServiceNow best practise is. We have multiple 'report an issue' record producers in our Service Catalog and therefore created multiple topics in Virtual Agent to match these. It was seen as 'messy' when all these topics were laid out in the 'Show me everything' Topic picker (as seen in Option 2) and we were therefore asked to create an overarching 'Report an issue' topic which within it, points to all the different report an issue topic blocks (as per Option 1).
From an aesthetical point of view it does look better, however I am concerned that all utterances for these 'sub-topics' now need to be linked to the 'Report an issue' topic and I fear that this method is not recommended.
Option 1 - Categorised into 'Sub-topics':
Option 2 - All in the 'Show me everything' Topic picker:
Can anyone share if they have done something similar, or any ServiceNow gurus advise what the best practise is? Should the initial Topic Picker just be a big long list?
Thanks in advance.
Rich
Back in Orlando (iirc), I too was using global_search_text -> topicDiscovery() as a workaround for the switchTopic() limitation/change (it actually worked as expected previously) - and we still use it for a few things I haven't gotten around to updating, but they definitely should be updated to use switchTopicById(). It's much simpler and way more efficient and even user-friendly because you don't have to go through NLU, which can add a delay - not to mention, could also just stop working temporarily (rare, but not unheard of), and break your topic switching.
Your assumption is right: you pass the sysid as a string, i.e. vaSystem.switchTopicById('57cde45053130010cf8cddeeff7b1291');
Based on your topic count, it sounds like you're lucky... We actually don't use categories because they (the user-facing feature of them at least) were introduced after we already had tens and tens of topics - roughly totaling 100 now - and the added work to modify all those topics and come up with some sort of categorization perhaps isn't as worthwhile as if we had done it from the start, such as the position you may be in. And since we have so many topics, for the sake of user experience, we've always tried to stress using search text (NLU) instead of manual topic selection which I find more important and useful than categorization in this instance.
And for what it's worth, I think categorization is most worthwhile if you can do it for (nearly) all topics. Any topics that aren't categorized will still show up at the bottom of the list under "Others", but that's a bit unattractive and non-user-friendly in my opinion. And the one big downside of categorization (imo) - though don't rule this out a future enhancement since it's a common ask - is that the categories are expanded by default. You can see an example of categorization from the docs below, which show both of these downsides.
That said, categorization is certainly not vital, but it is a very nice user-friendly feature to take advantage of for a rather low development effort, especially if you're talking a small number - let's say <20 - topics.
