Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
Summarize
Summary of Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
This guide assists ServiceNow customers in configuring chat experiences for Virtual Agent users, enabling tailored conversations based on user context. Chat experiences include setup topics, promoted topics, and AI Search configurations, providing a structured interaction model for users engaging with Virtual Agent.
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Key Features
- Setup Topics: Pre-built conversational elements like greetings, feedback requests, and error handling that automatically guide user interactions.
- Promoted Topics: Up to six relevant topics that can be displayed for quick access, enhancing user convenience.
- Search Profile: Defines how AI Search results are generated and displayed, ensuring users receive accurate information when needed.
Key Outcomes
- Customize the default chat experience or create specific ones based on user context, improving engagement and satisfaction.
- Utilize setup topics to maintain a consistent conversation flow, allowing users to interact more effectively.
- Test and verify chat experiences to ensure they meet user needs and function as intended before full deployment.
To get started, navigate to All > Conversational Interfaces > Settings, select Virtual Agent, and manage chat experiences through the Custom Greetings and Setup tile.
Create different chat experiences for your end users based on the context in which they initiate a conversation with Virtual Agent.
How chat experiences work
A chat experience defines the structure of a bot conversation (setup topics), an initial set of topics displayed to users (promoted topics), and the AI Search configurations for displaying search results in conversations. Virtual Agent provides a preconfigured, default chat experience that you (admins and topic authors) can use to control the user experience with Virtual Agent.
- Setup topics
Virtual Agent provides common conversational elements, such as a welcome greeting to begin a conversation and a conversation closing, and automatically includes them in virtual agent conversations. These pre-built elements, called setup topics, are part of a basic conversation structure that is applied to all your conversations. They are installed with Virtual Agent and Virtual Agent Lite.
These setup topics run automatically at appropriate points in a conversation, based on the context, utterances (if NLU is enabled), or keywords that users enter during the conversation.
Figure 1. Example setup topics in a conversation Virtual Agent provides the following types of pre-built setup topics:
Setup topic Description Greeting Presents a welcome greeting to users, and asks users to enter a request or see what items it can assist with. Provide Virtual Agent Feedback Displays a survey to get user feedback on the conversational experience, before the conversation ends. Live Agent Support Enables users to request a live agent transfer and view items that the live agent can assist with. Virtual Agent Capabilities Presents a list of what the virtual agent can help with. Error Handling Topic Displays a standard error message when an unrecoverable system error occurs and transfers the user to a live agent. Closing Conversation Displays a closing message that ends the conversation. AI Search Fallback Generates AI Search results for a user when Virtual Agent can't find a matching intent and topic or keyword. Fallback Topic Presents standard messages that ask the user to enter another request or select a different topic when the virtual agent does not understand a user entry or selection. Anything Else Topic After completing a task or request, virtual agent asks if the user needs further assistance with another request or task. The setup topics have corresponding intents (set in the pre-built NLU model for setup topics) and also keywords. Virtual Agent recognizes the utterances or keywords that users can enter to run certain setup topics, such as the Virtual Agent Capabilities (help) topic or the Live Agent support topic.
You can preview (test) the pre-built setup topics to see how they work. In the Topics page of Virtual Agent Designer, use the Type filter to list the Setup Topics and select the setup topics to test. Pre-built topics are read-only, but you can duplicate, customize (modify) if needed, and publish them.
- Promoted topics
- You can display a collection of up to six topics that are relevant to your users, displayed before the Show me everything button in the chat window. You can use these promoted topics in a chat experience to give your users quick and convenient access to the topics used for a given context.Note:Promoted topics may not be supported on all clients.
Figure 2. Example promoted topics - Search profile
A search profile defines how Virtual Agent search results are generated through the AI Search application and how the results are displayed to users. Virtual Agent uses a default search application that controls the data source for searches and a UI configuration (set in the Entity View Action Mapping application) that controls the search results displayed in Genius cards and multi-link output. These configurations also apply to search results generated as a fallback when Virtual Agent can't determine the appropriate topic. For more information, see Improving the user experience with AI Search.
Figure 3. Example AI Search result
Get started with chat experiences
Navigate to , and then select Virtual Agent. Use the Custom Greetings and Setup tile to manage the default and custom chat experiences. You can do the following:
- Configure the default chat experience, including the setup topics, promoted topics, and search criteria used. For example, you can activate the Virtual Agent Feedback setup topic so that it is applied to all your bot conversations.
- Create different custom chat experiences based on the context in which your end users run Virtual Agent. The settings that you define in a custom chat experience override the default chat experience.