[Music] hi everyone welcome to glidefest on air i'm colleen kelly the marketing assistant at fast consulting and i'll be moderating today's webinar virtual agent the future of customer support is conversational before we dive in we'd like to give you some background info on glidefast glidefast is a consulting firm that is dedicated exclusively to servicenow as an elite servicenow partner our expert team of developers and architects have worked on both sides of the table the customer side and the consulting side our company was founded by servicenow architects and we're proud to have a team of over 100 experienced consultants an average csat score of 4.8 out of 5 and more accolades as you can see here as a perk of attending today we'll be giving away a 50 visa gift card we'll announce the winner at the end of the session so be sure to stay on for the whole webinar i'm very excited to hand things over to our presenters david arbour a service delivery manager at glidefast and matt dumont an architect at glidefest we'll be watching the q a throughout today's session so be sure to send in any questions as they arise and we'll do our best to answer them david and matt you can take it from here great thanks colleen appreciate it uh yeah so let's talk about the uh agenda first i think this is gonna be a really exciting uh webinar um virtual agent right so uh agenda is gonna we're gonna cover one the overview so what the actual version sorry the virtual agent is uh and how it can help you um two is components we're going to talk about what uh what components make up the virtual agents which is always changing by the way and we're going to talk about capabilities so what can that virtual agent actually do for you then we're going to give a pretty extensive demo where we're going to show you virtual agent in action we're also going to show you some um agent workspace pieces and how they how uh the the fulfiller ui and the agent workspace ui uh work differently um to for different users for different personas um so that's going to be a a good demo uh then we'll take some questions and answers at the end great so let's start with overview uh what is the virtual agent and the virtual agent is a platform for providing user assistance through conversations so the whole idea of virtual agents is to give your users a way to to communicate um with you know with the system basically uh and uh it may be to to go through some faqs it may be to automatically generate incidents it may be to automatically generate requests the point of virtual agent is that it is a workflow so based on things that your that the user selects or answers to uh during the process then the flow is going to go a different path and present different options to that user um but in addition to that you can also there's also a handoff to a live agent that can occur as well so you can take the virtual agent up to a certain point if it doesn't answer the question that you need to answer he passed it on to a live agent just as if they were they're communicating with that service desk uh you know verbally okay so talk about the um components as well so the first piece is the conversational interface which is just the interface of how users interact with virtual agent right so uh virtual agent in the um fulfill ui looks one way it looks another way in the portal and then it looks another way in the agent workspace and you can actually take the the interface uh as an iframe and put it into any site that you want to put it into uh just by by pulling it out as an iframe and adding it to your html uh we'll show or we'll speak about the designer briefly as well so how you create those uh workflows that we talked about that i talked about at the previous slide and sort of what they look like what the out of the box pieces of a conversation look like and then we'll talk about live agent support as well um the live agent support really is uh so you hand it off during as a piece of that designer in your workflow or you can have the user select live agent from the beginning so we'll show you all of that and we'll actually play some role playing here with personas where matt will be a user and i will be an agent working in the agent workspace so you can see how that goes great and then let's generally talk about capabilities so there's a lot more capabilities than this but this is just sort of a generalization um so it's there to handle common requests and it enables users to get immediate help day or night so even if you're not staffed as long as it is a pathway that the user can get answers to in an automated fashion so without passing to a live agent then it's 24 7. so if it's something like faqs like i'm a new employee how do i do this uh you they can come in here at any time of day or night um and and find those answers that they need some of the common tasks are like i said answering faqs um so a frequently asked question uh you know framework for you could be as big or small as you want it to be as as an organization um we have one that we're going to show that we built it's just you know it's a very small one but uh sort of show you the flow of things um but the more you put in there i mean it's like a knowledge base right the more the more you put in there the more you can divert a person to not necessarily need help need help from a live agent uh providing tutorial information so you know that may be one of the options that you give a user is to come here and divert them to a tutorial as well you can query and update records so you can create incidents in an automated fashion you can create requests in an automated fashion uh you can update uh you know specifically you can update cis let's say somebody's communicating with it and something's broken let's you know set this piece of hardware that this user has identified to uh to in maintenance uh so you can do all sorts of things like that and then you can gather data such as the task attachments so you may ask the user at some point to attach something and then when it gets passed to a live vision at a later time that live agent has all the information in the context that he or she needs to uh to work on that case and you can resolve multi-step problems okay so again general these are things that you can do with the with virtual agent but by no means are they limitations okay i'll pass it on to matt now so you can talk a little bit about what we're gonna do for the demo thanks david all right so um we were presented with an interesting use case that i found kind of intriguing which was a lot of times we hear about how do you stand up a virtual agent what are the cool things a virtual agent can do and there are quite a few of them especially in terms of customer service and and helping with that process but what can what would it take to just stand up a simple live agent or a simple virtual agent and add on capabilities as you go and that's something that we kind of wanted to delve into a little bit today with our uh demo just to demonstrate um this setup took maybe the the full workday to come up with it's a pretty simple layout it's just it's going to start with an faq and some yes no questions to help the user kind of navigate through certain um question banks that that might be able to answer whatever that user is there to inquire about and then at the end of that process they're always going to be offered the opportunity to say no my question wasn't answered i'd like to keep looking or maybe i need to talk to somebody in person and this could be handled multiple ways we chose to use live agent which talk to your account rep but from what i understand live agent and virtual agent come as a package deal so you could even add on the live agent piece without needing to do a whole lot of extra in terms of modules and and what you own in the system um but then we also wanted to tack on the the incident creation piece because it's very um very smooth process there's not a whole lot of resistance to just responding to the user very quickly putting in an incident letting them know what the details of the incident are it's a very smooth transition to that piece of it um obviously to create an incident you would have to own the itsm module but what we really wanted to show is that you could stand this up no matter what pieces of servicenow you own you can stand something like this up very quickly and incorporate it into your customer service process and then add in features as it becomes a reasonable endeavor like if you add itsm or you add uh you set up your knowledge base then you can add in new features so we'll demonstrate some of those things and then um pretty much the world is your oyster at that point you can add on whatever is interesting to you add in problem add in case management all of those things without needing to necessarily do it all at once and that's kind of where we want to go with this so let me without further ado go ahead and open up my instance here first off i just wanted to i'm actually go back one step first i wanted to show the designer this can be a little bit overwhelming when you first get into virtual agent when you see all the different topics available and what each one may give you to do when you when you do it out of the box you're just going to have some setup topics and small talk topics but you can actually go for most of the modules that you own you can go and add a plug-in that will activate various topics for your plug-in in this case we activated the itsm one and you see you get a lot of out-of-the-box functionality for creating change requests creating incidents all sorts of cool features that you don't even have to build out yourself but for our purposes we went ahead and created a an faq and activated it and then we are using some of the basic topics in addition to that when when you activate a topic it's going to show up in a show me everything section at the beginning of the chat window which i'll show you in a little bit so what we did instead was we created an faq topic that kind of allows us to field questions up front before handing off to a live agent and gives the puts the power in the users hands to sort of figure out what their question is and how they want to answer it but then ultimately we'll guide them to a handoff if necessary and let them choose that so i won't get into too much detail on this but it's a really simple flow that we built you can see it starts out with just the faq topics and give some gives a basic introduction to that and that would show up in the show me everything section so once they select faq they get pushed through some various questions to narrow down what they're actually interested in answering and then we've built some these are really basic html pages but they do support if you dig into one it does support html formatting so you can actually go in and add more formatting make it more pretty as it were and make the response show up as a an html page that has some some style added to it but for this purpose we were just going to make it as simple as possible answer the questions and hopefully get to a point where we could solve their problems and pull up the service portal over here we picked a very relevant subject too it is on a polling station since we are yes we wanted to go for time to vote very relevant so i'm going to log in as my itil user here and go to the server's tutorial um i did also want to add it just as an aside to this some other cool features that virtual agent offers one of which is this is a sandbox slack instance that i've set up and i went through the process it took me about five minutes to really set up the integration and there's an out of the box integration and servicenow with slack you see here i can just link to my servicenow account if i log in then i can start immediately communicating with the um with the virtual agent that i have set up since i'm already logged in in the browser i don't even have to fill out any information it's just going to ask me if that's the correct account and because it's an account that doesn't have permission right now it's not gonna allow me but um if i log back out of here yeah this is what happens when you do it out of order okay so if i log back into my system administrator account and i try this again it's now linked to my account in slack to the virtual agent and when i go pull it up in the service portal you'll see this is the same basic set of topics that would show up there as well and uh i can select my topic just like i would there and there's actually a an interaction that's created between my uh sandbox here and the instance that is separate even if i did a different uh one through the service portal they're considered different interactions but it would actually log it as if i were interacting in uh servicenow service portal and then in addition to that um you can actually add as david mentioned you can add the widget through an iframe to a website of your choice so it doesn't actually have to be the service now service portal that you're interacting with the virtual agent there's also an integration with teams and i've set that one up as well it's about as simple as setting this one up and um you can track which accounts you have set up it's a pretty handy little feature to to add on and it's something that as we're discussing this those are the kinds of things that you don't have to have right away but you can add them and you can add them in multiple locations and anywhere you add it it's going to have the same set of rules for the user to interact the other small feature i wanted i would say small but one it's a pretty powerful feature that doesn't require a whole lot from you but there's a feature called nlu or natural language understanding and that feature is essentially the ai that you can add on to virtual agent in the you know i won't get into that a whole lot today we're basically using these keywords here to guide the user and you can add a list of keywords if the user types those in it'll pull up the topic that they're interested in but if you chose to add nlu it would actually allow you to train the bot to understand the intents of what the user is asking so if somebody types in i want to do this then by training the ai you can teach it if someone types i want to do x it's actually meaning pull up this topic it really needs to respond with this answer and that's a much more involved setup but um it can also be very useful for for your depending on what your needs are so we're just going to start up our virtual agent conversation and here's where i'm going to actually pass it off to david and he's going to show the agent workspace yeah so yeah let's pretend i'm an agent here and i'm logged into a service now so i'm going to go to the agent workspace so um as soon as i so i set myself to available whenever i come in here as an agent and matt is going to start a conversation on his end um that's going to go into a queue that as a as an agent working in the workspace here it's going to show up in my queue as soon as matt starts that conversation actually let me switch back over real quick and i'll show them the faq side of things i had a show me everything option that showed up and you can actually make it so that the topics are all of the topics that you have active are listed in the show me everything for our purposes we didn't show things like live agent transfer because we actually wanted to start with faq for the user i also added this search knowledge base feature this is just to demonstrate that as you add in say the itsm module if you add the knowledge management feature then you can actually set up a search process where they can actually go in and type in keywords to find articles related to what they're interested in pull up the full article since we wanted to show how simple it is even without itsm to start and then that these are things you can add on as you go we built a very the very simple faq that we showed earlier and um all i have is a few options i can say for my case i'm saying that i'm at a polling location and i happen to be um in a booth that the uh the actual voting machine malfunctioned so i went on their website and i want to go find out if there's a way to resolve that issue i think the closest to my topic is probably polling locations so i select that i get a couple of answers that are available through their most frequently asked questions apparently damaged voting booths is not one of them so i'm just going to click over here just to show what one of those results might look like but when i click on it i know location hours isn't really going to help me a whole lot so i got some basic location hours did not answer my question i'm going to tell the system no i need to continue do i want to transfer a live agent or return to the faq let me go see if there's anything else that might be relevant surely there's some there's something under voter registration right well no it doesn't seem to be so none of the above apply i've gone through my faq this could be as extensive as you want so you could have 20 questions that they have to go through you could categorize a multiple different layers as you saw i kind of gave an upfront question to get a basic broad category you could do that two or three different times you just have to build all the branching into the flow and then once i've determined that my question is not answered i'm going to transfer a live agent and then i'll i'll switch back over to david here and he can show the actual live agent piece of it so back where i was so we can now see that that has magically appeared so matt has transferred to a live agent i am the only live agent monitoring the queue right now so uh it's up for grabs now if we had multiple agents logged in it'd be uh you know anyone would be able to to allow or to grab it but as soon as it's accepted it's taken out of that queue okay so i grabbed the conversation you can see it is front and center here everything that we have began that we we've uh or that the user has gone through getting to this point so we see the entire conversation um we can also see that mattis sent me a message oh okay hello one of the polling booths at the main washington county voting site is malfunctioning oh okay oh well so i'm going to answer him i'm sorry to hear that um this is something i can help you with oh spelling uh is the polling booth still usable or is it completely down i like to know this because you know we want to know if there's gonna be work around and that we can put in place or if this is gonna have to be something that we need to get an agent out or a field agent out immediately to look at okay so it's intermittent intermittently powering off and on so that would indicate that is likely completely down is really not something that we can use uh cool so okay thank you for that uh what's the tag number on the polling booth uh the tag number is on the left hand side of the monitor okay so again just gathering more information that i'm going to need for the ultimate incident that we end up creating for this and passing onto a field agent so that field agent can go uh take a look ah abc123 great all right great i am going to create a ticket on your behalf so we can get the technician out to look ah at the bowling booth this should only take a minute or two great so now i'm going to go ahead and create an incident on this user's behalf um so we can see that there's already been an interaction created right so that happens automatically as soon as the conversation starts and then our action record is created so that interaction record just gets translated into a into an incident record when we go to create it so very very simple up here we have a create incident so that's where we're going to go so we can see some things already got pushed in so we know uh right now matt is actually logged into the system administrator so that came through automatically as the caller um this isn't inquiry help we're gonna say that it's a self-service contact type um and we're gonna put the new ci in so it's abc123 ah i didn't find it so let me try a polling booth there we go okay uh so that's our rci uh we're going to put in the short description here polling booth is down need assistance asap all right we're going to give it to our field services oh okay sorry may not be set up for that so we're gonna give it to the service desk and they can pass it to field services once they're done um sort of like a tier two that we're passing it to so that's our short description um we're gonna go ahead and create the incident like this safe and that incident gets created and so sort of the cool thing that happens here is that once the incident is created it's gonna uh the the user is going to know that that incident is created because they're gonna get all the information immediately okay so there's our new incident record okay so i'm just going to tell him i'm going to put the incident number in here oh sorry oh i apologize for that okay incident number is inc 0010024 right so once i put the incident number in there and let that user know that his incident was was created you can see all of the details populated right here along with the link so that user could go to that incident record um and and see the details on it okay uh okay um so i'm gonna let them know the ticket has been created please feel free reach back out if you experience any other issues a field tech should be on site soon okay so at this point i'll wait to hear from the user if the user is is uh oh great great thanks okay cool he's going to put up caution tape until it's resolved that's perfect sounds great sounds great thank you and have a great day okay so that's our interaction um so from here i mean the user could obviously um in the chat um and he likely will okay so there the chat has been uh closed um but it shows you how easily i mean you know a lot of people these days it's difficult like they don't want to get on the phone and wait for for a phone call so virtual agent really fills a gap here right so it's really really great for those users that need to quickly and maybe intermittently communicate with somebody like they have other things going on but they can chat um and you can see that that's the same result that they would have gotten had they called right so it could have been that the faq could help that user and we'd never have to get to the point of having an incident but in this case they did not have to interact on the phone they were able to do it all through chat um and it's just a super easy uh tool to use uh this part of the platform okay um i'm gonna pass it back to you matt and now we're into the questions and answers section so uh feel free to throw your questions into the chat and i think that colleen's gonna read those out to us or we can take a look at them all right thanks matt and david for that demo and all right everyone's diving to some of your questions first question we have here if i have the service portal and service catalog what is the value add of virtual agent i can take that one um so i would say that virtual agent you you can look at as sort of the the portal to your customer service in addition to your portal but i would say it's it's kind of a funnel for all of the questions and uh the users that might have a variety of things that that they need answered or in in other cases like if you were to do it for onboarding or for new users um a lot of times when you're brand new at a company you might sit down at your desk and you have about 10 different things you need to set up and there's always one person who knows what you're supposed to do but you don't know who that person is so you spend the first two hours of your your career basically asking your boss questions about who's supposed to be helping you with what things um something like this could be used for that as well where you just have the answers to a lot of the basic onboarding questions or the you know first um new employee questions uh and take them through that that process of question answer and get them to what they need or it kind of empowers them to really find what they want especially if you have something like the knowledge based search set up because a lot of times you might say all that information's in the knowledge base but it's still it's not as easy as just doing a keyword search and trying to find the articles that are relevant to you quick instinct incident creation quick transfer live agent a lot of it is just to um make that that first experience with customer service conversational rather than you a lot of times in self-service having to go out and figure out what you need to do and it's kind of just you know everyone for himself this is a way to make that self-service process a conversation with either with a bot in some cases for a virtual agent or a conversation with an actual person who can help and it just makes it a lot more accessible makes all that information feel accessible to uh to a customer great thanks matt and here's another one what part does ai play in virtual agent you want to take that david or go ahead and take that one again if you don't mind that so i talked a little bit about the nlu which is natural language understanding this is a feature that can be turned on we didn't for our demo uh but it's it's as simple as you go into the the configuration and you say i'm gonna use nlu and that's that's the beginning of it and then as you get into the process what you find is that you can kind of train it to understand what people are looking for when they type in things so like with a basic keyword search uh you saw my list of keywords i could say if the user types faq pop up the faq but what if i want to say if the user says i have a lot of questions and i need answers go to the faq you're not going to get that from a keyword search so you can train it to know based on what the user's intent was and based on what the user said you can correlate those two things and teach the bot this is where you need to go if these phrases are uttered and then beyond that as you train it it it starts to learn some of those patterns and to actually come up with the answer sometimes on its own and as you use it the more you use it the more accurate it can become and that's that's really where the ai piece of it comes in you don't excuse me you don't have to incorporate that immediately but it can really be a boon to you later on in the process as you start to hone that customer service process sounds good all right and here's another one we had come in does this work the same on mobile or desktop uh yeah generally so i mean as as a user uh you're gonna have an interface on your mobile device as well um if it's set up if your instance is set up to display uh the mobile chat so yeah you can interact with it as a user as you would in the platform uh or in the portal um it it now i mean obviously on the agent side it's it's not the same right so the agent's still gonna uh interact either through the fulfill ui or the uh agent workspace but yeah as a user you can definitely use mobile for this it looks like chat great thanks david we had another comment come in i love glide fast thank you anonymous attendee we love to hear it so do i agree we agree yeah that looks like about all we have for questions um so we'd like to move on to announce the winner of our fifty dollar visa gift card and the winner is going to be lynn white and we'll email you your products directly and it's gonna wrap some things up so thank you for everyone for attending we hope you enjoyed uh thanks man david for presenting if you have any more questions feel free to tweet them to us or reach out to us at info gladfest.com to see more sessions please visit our website so thanks everyone enjoy the rest of your day [Music] [Applause]