welcome everyone to virtual agent academy today we will be covering an exciting topic um but first just to introduce everyone my name is marcel goodsell i'm with our employee workflows product management group i am joined by my colleagues today paul van nisteroy who covers itsm product success nibble asby who is product management for conversational interfaces and victor chen who also is in product management for conversational interfaces so paul did you want to go to the next slide okay great and you can see that we really want to promote our community so if you have any additional questions or you're looking for information please feel free to head out to the community and this is where you can find replays of virtual agent academy and additional information so next slide please okay great so our goals for today um we first want to talk about how do we help create and curate warm intelligent personalized greetings that may span across different departments and part of that comes from planning out what's your virtual agent strategy how do you want to scale this across hrit and other departments we'll then go into the authoring experience of how to actually use a new quebec feature the custom greetings and setups to author a virtual agent greeting topic and then assign it to display in a specific portal and finally we're going to look at the type of experience that will help employees receive that personalized welcome greeting and help employee retention through using virtual agent so they can go to virtual agent and count on they can find information ready to them without even having to search so paul i'll kick it over to do you want to talk a little bit more about what our plans are to you know talk about how we look at this across hr and i.t and how we can promote a contextual strategy across virtual agent absolutely thank you marcel um yeah so um we're going to focus on ite and hr today uh i'll be covering the it portion and i'll show you some some examples of what we mean with personalized and contextual greetings and then myself we'll um we'll look at the hr portal i'll also look at the the the end user view so so how does that work in practice so how does the end user benefit from that um uh you may have seen this slide before but i want to just use this to set a scene for what we'll be covering today so uh from left to right on the top you'll see um a conversation starting with virtual agent and then in the the third step we can hand it over to a live agent if virtual agent is not able to answer the question or resolve the issues on the left hand side you'll see we have multiple clients i'm sure you know we have a team's integration and slack integration and there's multiple ways of of entering virtual agent but for today we want to focus on what is highlighted in the green box here um all the elements here that are highlighted like user profile outages that we are aware of any available requests or cases or incidents or assets or any knowledge based article we can rely on to personalize and contextualize the greeting so what does that mean so if we have an outage um if we can provide that information uh as soon as somebody opens up um a virtual agent before the end user having to say i cannot i i can't access email or i have trouble with system system x y or z that avoids the end user to have to type that in right if we can if we can preempt that by sending a message we're currently facing this outage so we're working on that the same with i mean one of the most frequent uses of a virtual agent or a live agent for that matter is can i get an update on my incident that i raised yesterday or last week or my hr case i've handed it in a week ago i'd like to just know where we are in the process if we can present that information before the the end user has to type anything in that's going to to to help the end user because they have a quicker answer and it's going to deflect incidents so it's going to be an efficiency gain there as well so we'll use this context to go over some examples within it and hr as we first said so before we get started with that on the left hand side you'll see it portal so we're going to look at how to personalize the greeting and we're also going to use an example on show you when this personalized greeting is being activated right so if i enter an it portal i may be expecting a different greeting i may be expecting different type of information and we've listed some examples here after hello we can say these are your open it tickets these are some outages that we're currently facing if we're facing any outages and then we have the concept of promoted topics and this can be topics that can be presented to the audience to the end user entering the it portal that is relevant to them this can be something i t focused right um and then after that we can show these are all the topics if you want me to show all the topics um i can show those then we go into topic discovery et cetera we'll focus on the first on the lighter green area in the it flow uh for for for today marcel maybe you want to tell something about the the example around hr yeah sure thanks paul so hr can be similar but yet different right because we want to remember the goal for the different portals is not to have a drastically different tone and tempo of the bot but simply to promote the needs of the organization so it could be an example where hr could be i want to promote open cases i want to promote cyclical events happening within the hr space so it could be anything from goals and performance to tax time to open enrollment so this gives the organization the capability to promote and make virtual agent helpful before the user even goes in to see what are the available topics so it's a great way to really personalize that different portal experience and really help the user get comfortable and gain the users trust using virtual agent and communicating that they can find help and assistance right when they need it the most perfect so underside yeah so you can see that the different examples right so when paul goes into uh the it build exercise you're gonna see an example of how you can personalize the greeting topic for specific to an it portal that might promote i.t specific capabilities and again it could be anything from vpn it could be outages it could be something related to migrating systems or migrating applications whereas hr could be a little bit different and promote things maybe a little bit more specific to the user or specific to things that the user would need to know or need to find additional information on to really reinforce that that empowered that self-service capability so paul i'll turn it over to you for the the next exercise thanks marcel so as we said in the beginning we're going to first author so we're going to show you what is needed from a design point of view to create that personalized experience and to also make sure that this is context sensitive meaning that it will be activated depending on the portal in this case that we're entering the va through and then i'm going to show you also what that personalized virtualization greetings looks like as the end user enters the portal so let me switch over to my instance here um right so i take it everybody's familiar with the user interface uh if i type in collaboration that will get me to the virtual agent and if i click designer it will get me to the overview of all the topics i've filtered out all the inactive ones i'm looking at active topics and now if i'm searching anything oops for greetings it will show me that there is currently three greeting topic blocks right so there's so topics there's a dynamic reading topic a greetings and a personalized reading topic i'm going to focus on the dynamic reading topic and this is the out of the box one so let's just drill in and see what we can find here so let me make this a little bit larger so we can actually read it so what is this doing and this is a greeting a topic that automatically kicks off whenever anybody starts a virtual agent the first question is is the user logged in if it's not we'll notify the user of their login status and said tell them if you want to if you want to access personalized information you probably want to log in and the other flow here in the case that the user is logged in there's a standard greeting we'll go then and to check it's a little bit larger check if there's any open tickets for this user all right remember that slider i showed if we know who the user is we can then find if there's any open request incident issues tickets whatever if those exist will show those tickets and tell them you have this many open tickets right and then depending on whether it's in this in this case three or more we will even list those tickets or we will just say well these are the ones and then by providing a hyperlink giving the end user the option to either drill into the however many tickets that they have at that point after that we'll show a message around outages right if any outages exist we show a message that says well these are the outages that we are currently facing and there's obviously some text around that we are aware of it we're working on that whatever text you you want to send and then after that we'll go to the topic pickup all right so as i said this is a out of the box greeting topic let me just very quickly show you what that looks like so if i hit test and will then show me hello josh so it recognizes me i currently have two open issues as is fewer than four so and and this is how we set up the flow it will list those two open issues i can have links to directly get into those tickets so i don't have to ask a question can you give me an update on that because it already says this one's in fulfillment and this one's still new so depending on when i enter that i might want i i may wonder whether it should be picked up by somebody by now service degradation and then let me know how i can help you today and then a few more words here so that's what the default greeting topping the reading topic looks like so what i'm going to do now and this is what we would promote as best practice is duplicate the out of the box topic to create one that i can then use myself right so i'm going to call it new dynamic reading so i'm going to enter the name i'm going to save it so now i'll be able to edit that flow right and also i can do whatever i want to and if i completely mess up i can always delete it go back to the out of the box one and create a new copy right so here's where i can add a name a description i want this to be the one the default one for it service portal which i'm going to work on later and i can get to the flow and here's where i analyze it a little bit here's where i can start adding some information so the first thing i want to add is i want to add a text box right after the greeting because i have an announcement to make and that announcement is that currently it's cyber awareness month right so i want everybody entering in into virtual agents through the it portal to be aware that we are a uh we're driving this campaign now to make people aware of cyber awareness i can add some text here for your information this oops this month is cyber awareness month and notice that there's a few formatting options here that i used to be having to go into scripting in previous releases we're currently looking at the queerback release i'm sorry i should have probably mentioned that what i can do is i can say i would like to add a link and that link is getting me to a solution a certain knowledge article in this case or i can say i want to emphasize this month so i want to make that bold i can even add some emojis if i want to but for now let's just stick to the text that i've added all right so there we go so we've added the text with those new formatting capabilities i get open tickets um and then uh you know what i'm gonna test see what this looks like now maybe it's picked that up uh already uh hopefully i did let's go in here and let's see what it brings us hello josh there you go this month is cyber awareness month and this will get me to that link that i was sharing on our own community within servicenow still have the two open issues uh and i have the text and i think this last bit of text here let me know how i can help you today that's sufficient whatever comes after that i really think that's just a lot of text that we can get rid of so let's scroll down to the end where i have my sent topic picker i go into that bit of scripting here and if i look closely here's where it says let me know how i can help you today and then after that is adding the other greeting message that i oops let me click that properly that i can do without so i'm just going to add two slashes to avoid that save it and i'm going to test it let's see if it picked up on that as well the cyber awareness month the two issues the outage and the shorter text and that looks a lot cleaner to me so i'm going to go with this so i made some modifications to this greeting topic and i need to save and i need to publish so that i can use it in my personalized greeting so i'm good with the the the new greeting now i need to agree on when we want to show this so type in collaboration again here's the new menu item that says custom greetings and setup so go to custom greetings and setup again this is new in quebec and here in custom greetings in setup we can see that there's a default chat experience and there's two hr uh uh ones defined let me open up the default chat experience to get started um so it's a default chat experience which has a high order number and i'll get back to that to that in a second but the order number is a thousand if i scroll down there's no conditions meaning so if there's no uh condition set so in any case better said this one will show and here's where you see all your setup topics and if you're wondering back why those setup topics are not under settings anymore this is where we move those two so for greeting the default greeting topic is the dynamic greeting topic this is the out of the box one that i just started of building my personalized one right so this is the name the dynamic reading topic that will show in the default chat experience so going back now to my customized experiences i'm going to add a new experience here that i'm going to call it service portal itsp right notice the order is 100 the default order and i can play with those orders to to to say which one overrides other ones right then the the the lower number the higher the rank it is so any changes i made in this greeting uh definition will override the one in the default okay now i need to define when i would like this to be applicable i can do an advanced filter to use whatever condition uh sorry scripting i see i mean to do whatever condition that i want to state here but for now i'm just going to for go for a simple condition saying if the portal starts with sp which in my setup is the it service portal i would like this to be active so what i would like to do i would like to change the default greeting so i select my greeting to the so click check to the uh what i call it new dynamic reading and click check so now what i'm doing is um i'm setting a condition for whenever somebody um enters the virtual agent through the it service portal the greeting will not be the old the the default reading but it will now be changed to the new dynamic reading that i just set up i also want to add a promoted topic let me show um i think there's one called service disruptions as the one so i want to promote this topic to become available to become visible before we get to the select any topic or show me all the topics so there we go um i need to save this and now i want to show you what the end user experience is going to be like so again i set up this specific new dynamic greeting with a little extra text box and some minor changes and i set up this custom greeting that defines that whenever somebody is coming in through the service portal they will actually see those dynamic reading and then they will also see this promoted topic so here's my service portal i'll do a refresh to make sure that it really picks up on all the things that all the changes that i did in the back in the background and now i start up my va conversation and let's see if it picked that up hello josh here it goes this is my cyber awareness month i have still the open issues i have the service degradation notification the short and let me know if i can help today and here's my service disruption template so quick summary setting up your custom greetings and then being able to sorry setting up your greetings topic and then using your custom greetings definitions to define when these greetings will apply and add things like promoted topics and with that myself i think i'm going to hand over back to you again great and this looks awesome by the way just to see this type of personal i.t greeting so let's take a look at what this experience can look like on the hr side so just switching over to back to the designer view again i'm in as the administrator in the same instance and assuming you guys are all familiar with with the interface here what we're going to do now is focus on setting up that same greeting but put an hr spin on it so i want to find that dynamic reading topic that paul duplicated and we're first going to go in here and i'm just going to click duplicate and we're going to call it new hr dynamic reading topic and we're going to save that and then we're going to go ahead and make some modifications to this new topic so you'll notice i'm brought to the properties page and we can go ahead and make some of those changes in the actual flow itself so making that a little bit bigger as you can see now here's the the same flow right we have the the normal greeting so bringing back the user's name the open tickets but let's just say for hr purposes we want to add some information maybe about tax time so we can say something like it's tax [Music] time and you can say something like please down your online form here if that's something you are trying to promote and again using the link capability this is where we could say something like http and maybe link it out to wherever you want the user to go it could be through single sign-on i'm just using adp as an example here but you can see you know if we wanted to add in an emoji and say all right um let's add an emoji there let's add a bulleted list so this was actually a very in-demand request so we're excited to share that it's available in quebec is to be able to use a rich text interface for some of the text outputs and i also wanted to make you aware we have a make it secure so this will actually encrypt any um inputs or outputs if you click make it secure so again that's a newer feature in quebec and so we've added the tax time prompt let's go ahead and add in something else because again this could be another initiative from the hr department update your info and we could say um we also need you to check to make sure your personal information is up to date and this is something where you could add a link but again um you could kind of use this prompt in conjunction with the promoted topics here and again just kind of highlighting some of the rich text capabilities we can bold that so one more thing before we go ahead and publish this topic i want to make sure we don't have open tickets displaying on the hr portal so i'm going to use a little trick here so we're going to set these to false and i'm going to do this a couple times for a couple of the areas where you might see i'd see related information so i'm just going to change these all to false and save those and we want to make sure that we're not showing any status tickets and we're not showing any outage information because again we want that sitting on the it portal we don't want that sitting on the hr portal and so again lastly we can have an outage response here so i'm just gonna make that quick update here and again we get to the topic picker and then i can save and then publish this topic so that it's ready for use so we're going to publish our greeting topic and then we're going to go back in and go to that same custom greeting setup so you can see here custom greetings and setup again we have some test information but i want to add a new greeting for the employee service center so what we can call it is esc greeting and we can leave the order at 100 and we can use the condition mode to select from any of the variables here and again these map to your context variables so just a quick if you know you type in chat setup here on the filter navigator this is where you would actually set your context variables in the chat setup so that they become available in this page so your context variables are going to match here your condition mode just one thing to mention so one of the the major initiatives for hr organizations is typically to have something that is kind of beyond the portal personalization so we may want to talk about having specific promoted topics if you have a certain type of case open so let's say you're on a leave for example so for those types of employees with leave cases open maybe we want to promote certain topics or have a different type of greeting this also could be geolocation so it could be you know something that you want to say okay people in this department or this geo location we're gonna have specific readings or specific promoted topics to you based on the type of cycle or the type of information you would find helpful at this time of year so we have the advanced condition to help drive and facilitate those types of experiences for today we're going to start with just a simple portal and i'm just going to say is esc and again this would match your portal extension so if your portal extension is my hr that's what you would use here but for purposes of today we're going to use esc and we're also going to add in our setup topic so for the greeting we're going to say this is going to be the new i want to pick the hr1 and i'm going to add some promoted topics here so in this case maybe i want the updates maybe i want to update emergency contact and maybe i want to promote ad emergency contact again because we built that prompt in to have people update their personal info and more importantly maybe i'm transitioning from a chat strategy into virtual agent and i want to promote live agent support so that employees know that they're supported with a live agent experience at any point in the in the topic conversation so we're going to go ahead and create this so again we can just double check everything looks good and go ahead and switch back over now to our portal view so if we go out to the employee service center this is going to launch me into the portal view and i'm just going to do a quick refresh to make sure that everything's cleared and ready to go and one thing you'll notice is there's no chat history preserved here and so again this is this is the assumption that we've added the skip load history equals true prompt into agent chat in this type of experience so that just for purposes of showing you um you know that's why the history isn't showing up normally if you didn't have that parameter set on the portal view of agent chat you would retain your history so that's the reason you're not seeing it here but again you're seeing the promoted tax time and you're seeing the personal information update and then the promoted topics here so again this just demonstrates how you can have completely different experiences but maintain that harmonized tone and tempo across different portals so i think uh nabil and victor we're going to pause there do we want to answer any questions live at this point sure we have a lot of great questions um i'm just i got the same question from multiple times so i i would like to make sure that it is clear um so if we uh what we did today will you have under show me everything the same number of topics that we have in the service portal so the answer is yes the list of topics is always going to be the same the the unique and the context is going to apply for the promoted topic and we don't really recommend that you change the list of all topics per portal you can change the promoted topic give it a context the reason is when you have sorry when you have uh portals that are let's say close to each other uh and that service is not very clear like the line is a little bit uh blur between workplace services for example and legal and hr you rely on the employee to understand where do i need to navigate but what we're doing now is promote the topic depending on the porthole and if the user cannot find his topic there he can just type or browse the whole list this way they don't really need to understand and remember each topic exists in which portal that's a question that we got [Music] that regarding the greeting we have another question is it available in teams so the dynamic greeting will be displayed the same as you can see right now in teams the only difference the promoted topic is not supported by teams so the first three topics that you see right now those won't be promoted what you will see in teams is the whole list of show me everything and the rest of the answers are um answer typed uh so much so you can go ahead and they'll keep um bringing answers okay great i mean that that's all we had i think we just wanted to talk a little bit more about heading out to community and if you have questions on this capability and want to collaborate with your peers or reach out to to others who may be exploring this capability or others you know we would just encourage you to head out to community poster questions review community for answers um you guys are the ones that make it what it is so the more we can collaborate the stronger we get together thank you very much thanks paul that was great all right thank you everyone see you in two weeks