Virtual Agent Announcement

[Joe F]

Is there an OOTB solution to show an announcement when someone opens the Virtual Agent?  For instance, someone opens the VA and a splash page opens to announce a current outage.  The user clicks off the announcement and proceeds to the VA welcome.  It doesn't have to happen exactly like that , but that is the gist.  

If not OOTB, is there a way to script this without a change?  The Service Portal announcement is helpful, but we are integrated with Teams and are searching for a solution that would show in Teams and in the Service Portal.

[Chris D]

Not OOTB, but with pretty simple coding experience, it can be done fairly easily in a custom Greetings topic - just add a new conditionally-visible output (sounds like a one-item multi-response output would work best for you if you want an "interrupt") before the Greetings returns the topic picker. We do something similar for high impact incidents, but the same could be extended to the outage table and/or the announcements table.

Reminder though that Teams VA users can bypass the Greetings topic (if they type an utterance instead of "hi") - so if there are high priority announcements you want your users to see, you may want to consider Configuring Virtual Agent notifications (servicenow.com)