Virtual Chat Agent (VCA) - Conversation starter / way to handle different introductions

[GlennG_]

I was wondering how other organizations are handling this. One of the biggest pieces of negative feedback that we receive from our user community, which sounds simple, is how the VCA doesn't handle simple conversation starters. We get daily screenshots showing how a simple intro to VCA couldn't be handled. Users have tried ChatGPT, and that is typically their experience expectation. What we have done is start generating a text file with which we feed some typical starters/openings on a daily basis and then update SN on a weekly basis. I also added a screenshot of our chat session.

"Hello, I need your help."
"Hi, can you help me."
"I need help."
"Hey"

"Good Afternoon"

For context, we are a multi-national organization with users spread all over North America, Europe, and AsiaPac, so we have different ways individuals start conversations (all English language, but we have added some localized greetings; "hola." Just interested in how others are dealing with this, if at all.

[Chris D]

Are you not using NLU?

Those are all utterances that can go into one intent, such as "Greetings", and you map your intent to a specific topic that can respond to those vague user greetings. While a bit redundant for Portal users*, I just have it mapped to our Greetings topic (set as our Greeting setup topic) so it says "hi" and then asks the users to input their search text.

*I say this is redundant because, when you open VA, the Greetings topic is displayed automatically - so this just means it'll be displayed twice in a row. Redundant, but it's pretty clear that the user didn't read the Greetings message so I don't particularly feel bad.

Note that in Teams (and presumably Slack), this is NOT the case - the Greetings topic doesn't start automatically so it's not redundant there.