Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
Summarize
Summary of Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
ServiceNow Virtual Agent enables you to create tailored chat experiences for end users based on the context in which they start conversations. A chat experience controls the conversation structure through setup topics, offers quick access to relevant promoted topics, and manages AI Search configurations to enhance search results within conversations. While a default chat experience comes preconfigured, you can customize it or create multiple custom experiences to suit different service portals or communication channels.
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Key Features
- Setup Topics: Pre-built conversational elements such as greetings, feedback surveys, live agent transfers, error handling, and conversation closings that automatically run at appropriate points during a chat. These are included with Virtual Agent and Virtual Agent Lite (with some limitations).
- Promoted Topics: Up to six relevant topics can be displayed prominently in the chat window for quick user access. These help guide users toward common requests based on the context.
- Search Profile: Defines how AI Search results are generated and displayed within Virtual Agent conversations, including fallback scenarios when no matching intent or topic is found. This enhances the user experience by providing relevant information through Genius Result cards.
- Customization: You can configure the default chat experience, enable or disable setup topics like feedback collection, and create custom chat experiences tailored to specific user contexts. Custom experiences inherit default settings but can override them as needed.
- Testing: After configuring or modifying chat experiences, you can simulate conversations to verify that topics and search behaviors work as intended.
Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers
By setting up chat experiences, you can:
- Ensure users receive appropriate greetings, guidance, and fallback support during conversations.
- Highlight the most relevant topics to streamline user interactions and reduce time to resolution.
- Leverage AI Search to provide intelligent, context-aware answers even when predefined topics don’t match user queries.
- Create multiple chat experiences tailored to different portals or channels, improving user satisfaction by aligning with their specific needs.
- Maintain control over conversation flows and user feedback collection to continuously improve Virtual Agent effectiveness.
Use the Virtual Agent settings under Conversational Interfaces to manage and customize these experiences, ensuring your virtual agents deliver consistent, context-sensitive support across your organization.
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
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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), topic description (if LLM 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. In NLU conversations, 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. In LLM conversations, their descriptions of the setup topics themselves are used by the LLM for topic discovery.
You can preview (test) the pre-built setup topics to see how they work. On the Virtual Agent Designer home page, use the filter icon
to sort only for Setup Topics, and then 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
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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 For more information, see Promote or demote LLM topics in Virtual Agent Designer
- Search profile
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A search profile defines how Virtual Agent search results are generated for an AI Search application. The search application's configuration specifies a search profile to use, and also determines how the generated results are displayed to users. Virtual Agent uses a default search application configuration and search profile that controls the data sources used for searches. Its UI configuration (set in the Entity View Action Mapping application) controls the search results displayed in Genius Result answer 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.