Exploring other Virtual Agent features
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Summary of Exploring other Virtual Agent features
This guide outlines various advanced features of ServiceNow's Virtual Agent that extend beyond basic topic creation and scripting. These features enable customers to enhance conversation functionality, improve user experience, and streamline topic maintenance across multiple channels and integrations.
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Key Features
- Multi-Channel Deployment: Virtual Agent can run not only in the default chat widget but also across other channels. While some controls like carousels may be limited in certain channels, you can customize conversation flows accordingly.
- Link Unfurling: Automatically generates rich content previews when supported links are shared within conversations on chat widgets, mobile devices, and other channels, improving interaction quality.
- AI Search Integration: Enables fallback search functionality when user inputs do not match defined keywords or intents, displaying relevant search results to users to maintain engagement.
- Reusable Topic Blocks: Create and maintain common conversation functions centrally, allowing reuse across multiple topics to reduce duplication and simplify updates.
- Custom Controls: Develop custom input and response controls within Virtual Agent Designer for specialized conversation handling beyond built-in options.
- Workflow Studio Integration: Embed ServiceNow Workflow Studio workflows into Virtual Agent topics, enabling secure input handling such as password entry via supported data types.
- Agent Chat Hand-off: Customize Virtual Agent to escalate conversations to live agents when necessary, ensuring seamless support transitions.
- Incident Auto-Resolution: Automatically initiate Virtual Agent conversations after incident submissions via email or Service Portal to attempt automated issue resolution.
- Localization: Use the ServiceNow Localization Framework to translate Virtual Agent topics and natural language models, supporting multilingual user bases.
- NLU Workbench Advanced Features: Enhance management and improvement of natural language understanding models with additional tools available from the ServiceNow Store.
- Integration with Other Portals and Apps: Extend Virtual Agent capabilities by connecting it to existing employee and customer platforms.
- Virtual Agent REST API: Use the REST API (available from the ServiceNow Store) to integrate Virtual Agent with any chat interface or multi-bot environment.
Practical Application
ServiceNow customers can leverage these features to build more flexible, intelligent, and user-friendly Virtual Agent experiences. Multi-channel support and link unfurling enhance accessibility and interaction richness. AI Search fallback ensures users receive helpful responses even when exact matches don’t exist. Reusable topic blocks and custom controls streamline topic development and maintenance. Workflow integration allows secure and complex process automation within conversations. Localization and advanced NLU tools support global deployment and continual model improvement. Finally, API and portal integrations enable embedding Virtual Agent capabilities wherever users interact.
After creating topics with the basic Virtual Agent Designer controls and scripting, you can also enhance conversation functionality and topic maintenance by using additional Virtual Agent features.
After learning the basics, here are some other Virtual Agent features that may help you improve your authoring and end-user experience.
- Deploy Virtual Agent in other channels
- By default, Virtual Agent runs in a chat widget, but you can also run it in other channels. While some features may not be available in certain channels (such as the carousel user input control), you can customize your conversation flow to accommodate these differences.
- Use link unfurling in Virtual Agent
- Virtual Agent supports link unfurling on the chat widget, mobile devices, and various channels. Link unfurling generates a content-rich preview when a supported link is shared in a conversation with a user, a virtual agent, or in a text-based bot response.
- Improve the user experience with AI Search
- What happens when a user utterance isn't matched to a keyword or intent? Enable AI Search as a fallback so that the user sees a list of search results as a response when no other match is found.
- Maximize code reuse with topic blocks
- Rather than duplicate common functionality in multiple topics, you can create reusable topic blocks that you can reference in many topics. This allows you to maintain frequently used functionality in one central location.
- Customize Virtual Agent with custom controls
- If a Virtual Agent Designer control doesn't quite work for what you want to achieve, create a custom control. You can create your own controls to accept input from the conversation, as well as custom response controls to handle the output. Use these controls within topics to handle specialized tasks.
- Integrate Virtual Agent with Workflow Studio workflows
- If your company is using Workflow Studio to create workflows, you can integrate them into Virtual Agent. You may need to do this if your conversations require you to pass secure inputs, such as a password. Workflow Studio actions and subflows support the password2 data type, which lets you pass the input securely.
- Use Virtual Agent with Agent Chat
- Customize Virtual Agent to hand off some conversations to a live agent when needed.
- Use Virtual Agent for Incident Auto-Resolution
- Initiate a Virtual Agent conversation with an end user after they submit an incident through email or the ServiceNow® Service Portal if an existing Virtual Agent topic can resolve the issue.
- Localize Virtual Agent topics
- Use the ServiceNow Localization Framework to translate topics and NLU models into other languages.
- NLU Workbench - Advanced Features
- Expand the functionality of NLU Workbench to help you manage and improve your models. NLU Workbench - Advanced Features is available from the ServiceNow Store.
- Integrate Virtual Agent with other portals and apps
- Integrate and extend the capabilities of Virtual Agent by connecting to your employees and customers where they already are.
- Use Virtual Agent REST API in a standalone or multi-bot environment
- Integrate any chat interface or bot using this REST API that is available in the ServiceNow Store.
Additional resources
Take advantage of the following ServiceNow® resources to help you customize your Virtual Agent: