Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
Summarize
Summary of Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users
This guide explains how ServiceNow administrators and topic authors can create and customize chat experiences in Virtual Agent to tailor conversations based on the context in which end users initiate interactions. Chat experiences define the conversation structure, promoted topics, and AI Search configurations to optimize user engagement and support.
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Key Features
- Chat Experience Components: Each chat experience includes setup topics, promoted assets, and a search profile. Setup topics provide foundational conversational elements like greetings, feedback requests, live agent transfers, error handling, and conversation closing.
- Default and Custom Experiences: Virtual Agent provides a default chat experience that can be configured or extended by creating custom chat experiences. Custom experiences inherit default settings but allow overrides to suit different user contexts such as various service portals or communication channels.
- Setup Topics: These pre-built topics run automatically during conversations based on user input, keywords, or conditions. They ensure consistent interactions and include features like AI Search fallback when no matching topic is found.
- Promoted Topics: Up to six relevant topics can be highlighted to users for quick access, improving navigation and efficiency in conversations. Note that promoted topics may not be supported on all client platforms.
- Search Profile: Defines how AI Search results are generated and displayed within Virtual Agent conversations. This includes fallback scenarios when specific intents are not recognized.
Practical Steps for ServiceNow Customers
- Access chat experience settings via All > Conversational Interfaces > Settings > Virtual Agent.
- Use the Custom Greetings and Setup tile to configure the default chat experience or create multiple custom experiences tailored to different usage contexts.
- Activate or deactivate setup topics like Virtual Agent Feedback to apply consistent conversational elements across all interactions.
- Customize promoted topics to provide users with convenient shortcuts to commonly used topics relevant to their context.
- Modify the search profile settings if needed to influence how AI Search results appear during conversations, enhancing user satisfaction.
- Test chat experiences after configuration changes to ensure they operate as intended before deployment.
Why This Matters
By leveraging chat experiences, ServiceNow customers can deliver contextual, efficient, and user-friendly Virtual Agent conversations that improve engagement and resolution rates. Customizing conversations based on user context and incorporating AI Search fallback enhances the overall support experience, reducing frustration and increasing self-service success.
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 assets), 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. Setup topics for LLM conversations rely on their own descriptions as the intents, which the LLM uses 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 assets 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 assets For more information, see Promote or demote LLM conversational subflows, actions, and 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 assets, 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.