hello all welcome to the virtual agent academy uh my name is navi laspi and i'm here with marcel goodtail and aaron bailey um today's topic is going to be how to use microsoft to improve the virtual agent conversation first if you have any questions please always feel free to leave them in the q a section i'll try our best to answer them our goals for today is to learn how to configure microsoft teams the messaging app framework with your servicenow instance after that we're gonna talk about and learn the best practices on how to design an optimal virtual agent experience with teams and the last part we're going to experience the virtual agent with microsoft teams um as i mentioned please leave us your questions in the q a section before we jump into the exercise um first let's talk about the integration that servicenow and microsoft teams have built together so we uh both companies teamed up here to deliver the customer with a great digital experience and supercharge the employee productivity by integrating the virtual agent and microsoft teams as you know teams is fast growing social collaboration platform and with this ai bar chatbot solution bringing it into the employee workspace the employee will benefit from having one stock shop for example to get information very easily resolve issues without having to look for the right portal or look for the help desk second we can easily make requests by performing routine work tasks and seamlessly speaking and transferring to live agent so in summary what we're doing here we're extending the reach of all of servicenow powerful workflows that are running on the now platform by putting them into the flow of people day-to-day lives which is microsoft teams now um part of this integration what we also delivered is a virtual agent light itsm plugin so if you don't have the microsoft uh the servicenow itsm professional uh product you can still experience this by installing this va virtual agent live and uh there you're gonna find us out of the box conversation like to report an id issue check the status of an issue and search the knowledge base um so we're going now to marcel is going to take us through the steps to how to configure this step by step um marcel can you please show us how do you configure that yeah thanks nabeel for that great intro so as we kick off the session today we thought it made a lot of sense to cover some of the administrative actions that you would need to do to first get situated on the teams using adaptive adapter framework and so what we're going to do is walk through what that looks like make sure that you see some of the screens that you would need to visit in order to set those up and then once from your service now instance how you would initiate that integration with the adapter framework how that works some considerations that you might need to think about and then finally from the user perspective how do we link your microsoft teams tenant for use with virtual agent so as we move forward into more some of the the um housekeeping items of how do we even get started with setting this up right and aaron did you want to talk a little bit more about the microsoft 365 developer program and how somebody could get going absolutely so the microsoft 365 developer program is a free program which gives you access to a developer or a testing tenant and you can add up to 25 users and it's free um so it gives you a free staging environment that you can use to set up your servicenow and teams integration and test it out without having to roll it out live to your entire organization uh so first you would go to the link that's shown in the slide in stage one and click join now you'll complete a little bit of information and when when you've set up an account it'll take you to this admin portal where you can see your team's tenant as well as your office and other in 365 products great thanks aaron and some considerations so aaron from your experience i mean which one would you say is probably the most important or some ones that users might need to be mindful of yeah so if you already use m365 that's been provisioned by your organization and you're also trying to use m365 in that developer tenant you might hit some confusion of which tenant you are logged into at a particular time so my recommendation is to either sign out of your organization's microsoft accounts all across the board or to use an incognito or private browser for all of the testing and staging that you're doing so that your authentication isn't carried over from your organization otherwise you have two authentications or two identities that are trying to sign into the same thing and it can get really confusing really quickly awesome that's super helpful and toward the end we'll cover some more in-depth troubleshooting tips but for now i would say these are probably the most important things to be aware of at this stage so as we move forward with how do we actually install this adapter framework and how do we make sure that this this process is working and users can connect so before we go into the live demonstration the steps i'm going to take you through first are how do we install the teams integration from the servicenow instance and then how do we go ahead and link those two accounts so the tenant account your servicenow account and under once you're in the team's tenant how do you then go ahead and make sure you have access to virtual agent to be able to use and so once you have access you've linked your accounts you can begin using the virtual agent application and it walks you through a series of steps of just starting linking your account and then you are good to go in terms of being able to use either keyword discovery for topics you can use natural language to discover intents that are available at your organization so you're free to go ahead and start using that i will pause there uh nibil it looks like there's some questions coming in did we want to take a few at this point yeah one of the questions are what are the list of plugins that we need to configure on the personal instance yeah that's a great question so you would want to make sure this is under the assumption that you have all of your virtual agent plugins installed so i would make sure that you have your virtual agent plugins if you're using natural language understanding you have those plugins as well and i would encourage you to visit docs to see what specific plugins you need for the teams adapter framework but you want to make sure you have the trifecta of those three just for the virtual agent portion again as the beal mentioned earlier there's other components to this integration so if you want to deploy those as well i would also encourage you to visit docs to make sure you have the correct ones installed thanks marcel the other question is if you have the hr professional then the itsm pro plugin is not needed so [Music] virtual agents part the professional offering and service now so if you have the hr professional you can use virtual agent with hr and the same thing goes for itsm pro if you have virtual agent and itsm pro then you can use it in context of idsm i hope that answered the question um going through the other questions can you connect your microsoft development tenant to a servicenow developer instance so yes this is what actually marcel is going to show us during this session okay great so let's switch over to the live demonstration portion and just to cover um some housekeeping items right so as erin mentioned earlier this is what the developer program looks like i would click join now it would take me through a series of steps where i can set up a new profile and once i have all of this information set up i can then go ahead and move to my admin center so the area i want to focus on today is being able to add a user so under user management i can go ahead and edit i can add a user here and this is for test purposes so i'm going to use somebody who's actually in my demo instance so we're going to use best and i'm just going to give her a quick email so bess am at this domain so this is an important for login you want to make sure you have the onmicrosoft.com domain and we'll give her a password so i'm going to go through the steps of adding a user yes i want to use this as a test user and i will finish adding best so now we have our user added i can go ahead and test something out using best so going over to my servicenow instance you can see i'm logged in as this exact user and how i got here was i typed in messaging apps integration and so this screen brings up um some of the different adapter frameworks we're going to focus on teams today and once i click install it's going to go ahead and take me to a third-party site and this is where one of the common areas people can get confused or experience issues because you may already be logged in so what i'm going to do is add that new email to this account so i'm going to say best m at i'm going to give her new email we just created and her password okay so it offers you to use multi-factor authentication i'm going to skip that for now and i'm going to go ahead and accept now this is just adding the user so now it says i've installed so this is a great confirmation i'm going to go to teams at this point and so here's where i need to go ahead and sign in as best right so i'm going to skip and i'm going to stay signed in as best so now i am actually in the team's tenant but there's one more step i need to do in order for virtual agent to work so while that tenant's coming up um nabil were there any questions we wanted to take at this point yeah so one of the questions is do we need integration hub for this integration so um integration hub is not really needed for this there is another integration between servicenow microsoft teams that touch the integration hub but for this one you don't need it another question is is the integration just limited to three topics or can we configure more topics uh to be clear on that the virtual agent um is a framework and you can configure and create more topics only if you don't have the idsm pro or the hr pro you get access to the itsm va lite and there you have only three topics that you cannot customize awesome thanks nabil so we're going to move into our our last step here to connect this and i'm going to pull up the apps and the easiest way to do this is to type in service now and you'll see the virtual agent option comes up i'm just going to simply click add because i want to make sure that this is available and i'm now be able to start a conversation so i'm brought to a start menu i can click start and i will be prompted to then link my account with the servicenow account so it takes just a minute but it's now giving me this option to either continue as guest link to service now so that's what i'm going to do and i want to confirm that these accounts are both linked so i'm going to confirm that message and at this point it should open up a new tab and just say this is confirmed my account has been successfully linked for testing purposes so navigating back over to virtual agent i'm now live in teams and i can select from a variety of issues that are currently deployed with virtual agents so this is one of my my options i can pick from this list but nabil you mentioned there's a really important point here right with using teams and one of the productivity enhancements that users and organizations see exactly so one of the common thing we hear from customers who are using virtual agents with teams is how much they get more engagement because their employees spend his day-to-day uh tasks in teams chatting with other colleagues so it makes it so easy to update a task or improve the data quality because it's much easier to access any case any information that you have inside of the servicenow instance while he's still in that tool that he used day-to-day so can you show us an example here where we can update a task yeah so updating a task is probably one of the more common things somebody might do and again let's keep in mind bess is probably a user that sits on the fulfiller side so bess wants to update a task she's received some information about someone's order for a new desktop monitor and as she's going through this process she can find more information on this particular incident but notice the font changed here right so from an aesthetics perspective and from a brand compliance standpoint maybe this is something that is part of the authoring experience i want to explore a little bit more i want to make sure best has a very streamlined way of being able to use the virtual agent to go ahead and add a comment or a work note so let's come back to this but this is really gets into what i wanted to cover next with the authoring experience and so as part of the authoring experience right one of the the biggest questions we get is we've deployed virtual agents we use it on the portal how do we go ahead and extend that experience so that we get seamless authoring into teams so what we're going to do is take an example of that task topic and go ahead and make a small change to that as part of the authoring experience so nabil did we want to pause for questions at this point i know i see some coming in yes we have a lot of questions this is great so um can we customize the va brand in microsoft teams instead of using the now virtual agent i don't think currently it is available that you can do the branding within microsoft teams i think it is on the short term roadmap for the virtual agent other questions do you need integration hub for this uh integration not for this specific use case integration hub is not needed when you connect teams with virtual agent um marcel do you would you like to speak a little bit more on the licensing when it comes to hr professional if virtual agent is available there sure yeah so virtual agent is really available with hr professional or hr enterprise so anything that really includes the portal is part of your sku you will have entitlements to virtual agent so you can use the out of box conversations build new conversations but you're kind of free to use it if you have entitlements to those skews i haven't more one more question for you is there a limitation on sending attachment for uh incident from teams well so and that's one of the the um things we wanted to talk about right as we get into the authoring experience so one of the limitations today and this is something on our roadmap is if you're familiar with the file picker right so this allows you to upload an attachment or copy an image or a file type over currently it's supported with copy paste only so we expect to have the ability to actually upload that file from your desktop or laptop or other device um in the short term roadmap but today it's more of a copy paste exercise but it is supported um so that's that's definitely something where we want to talk about as part of the authoring experience okay great so we're in as this update task here right and what i want to do is so we want to pinpoint where we saw that experience right with this notification and as we come in here we can see that there's actually is part of this topic a scripted task card so i'm in the update task out of box topic and what i want to do is make a change here so i'm going to deactivate this topic and i'm going to duplicate it so i can make that change and we're going to call it new update i t task so marcel this is part of the best practice is always when you want to do customization to one of those on for the box topics is to duplicate it before that's just so you can get the latest and greatest in the next release yep absolutely and it may take a minute or two for that topic to copy over um so just be patient but in the meantime while that's copying over you can kind of see what intent it's linked to if you're using natural language understanding um and go ahead and make any additional changes so we're gonna refresh the screen and make sure we get our new update i t task topic so we can edit that and one thing to note too this will only show up at the bottom if you're using natural language understanding so you want to make sure that if you have keyword turned on you probably won't see this but when you copy that topic you want to make sure that that this is showing up if you actually have an nlu intent associated with it all right so let's try it again over here so we're going to go into our designer view oh maybe that's why we do that we have a question that keeps coming is is there a way to do a mass linking auto linking so the good news um yes you can do it in in the upcoming release in queue release you'll be able as an admin to mark auto linking and that means that all users won't need to do the step that marcel just show us yeah great thanks nabil so once we're in here right i'm in a duplicated topic so i can go ahead and make some changes so what we want to do is produce an experience that has one of the out of box cards because that's going to render better in teams and what i can call it is new card display and i'm just going to make some edits here so i want to reference a script and i want to call the incident table from here and the reason i'm referencing a script is because a lot of these actions these pre-actions before you get to this point are script actions so we want to go ahead and reference that and we want to add a condition here and what we're going to do is build this on cis id because again that's best practice it's part of the script and we're going to pull in a script variable that's already been set in our virtual agent topic design um so all i'm doing is i'm saying you know new card display we're going to create a condition and we're going to tell it what table to look at and what fields i want to display is really up to me so short description priority and let's go with updated and i want to see the caller field also because i want some more information there and so i want to save my work here but i also want to do one more thing so instead of dragging and dropping these and removing this card it's actually easier to come in here and set the condition to false so that this doesn't show so this is a little hack you can do to invalidate one of the nodes so i've set this to false and so i'm expecting my new card display to show instead of that scripted output so from this point i'm going to publish this task so as that publishes i just want to double check the properties that my intent comes up so that is looking good and let's switch back over here so i'm going to now initiate this conversation again but with that different authoring experience no okay so let's try it again with the new update task and so once that initiates my new it topic should show up with a better card display in the microsoft teams tenant um so while that's thinking right we want to go ahead and select one of these so i'm going to select the desktop monitor that i want to make an update to and notice voila we have a much better output on that card so you can breathe a sigh of relief this is one of the you know the recommended practices we advise to kind of optimizing your existing tasks for teams and i can go ahead and add maybe a comment to this so i want to make an update i want to just say um i received an eta from procurement and so we can just add a quick note to that and i'm asked if there's anything else that can be of assistance so switching back over quickly to our authoring experience so we run it really talk about best practices so there's a couple gotchas with teams obviously we just covered um the difference between using a script output versus a card output um so you know that's one of the ways where you can get the display to look a little bit more seamless as we go through some of the builders right the user inputs we talked about the file picker um so if you use a file picker you probably want to specify you know simply copy paste into into the team's tenant and the carousel so anything really with images you may want to look at rescaling those images sometimes they can display much bigger than on the portal so that's just something to be mindful of as well as html so if you're using an html node in your virtual agent design you may want to look at using a different utility or a different bot output as opposed to the html right because the font can be a bit larger than the standard font and again custom controls we haven't tested this but that may be something to be mindful as well so nabil were there any other questions on the authoring experience before we go ahead to the employee experience so we had a question um if we if there is a way to have a version control i think the the current way is to use duplicate right to give the topic different things to make sure that you have the latest version in that [Music] so i'm trying to go through the questions um i see can we leverage the same topic we use and what client va or do we have to create new topics specific for microsoft teams marcel i think this is one of the advantages of using virtual agent is you build a conversation in the designer build once deploy everywhere so you don't have to deploy a conversation for each channel you just have to maintain it in one place absolutely yeah and it's a way to look at i mean obviously everything's going to render fine on the portal i think when you look at expanding into teams you want to just make sure and test that all of the different nodes that are part of your design are working and looking pretty seamless from the end user perspective so that's just one thing to be aware of but as nabil mentioned we have tons of builders and that can easily be accomplished okay so i'm going to move forward with the user experience so there's a couple really neat ways that users can interact with teams that you can't do on portal and we want to showcase what that looks like and just show a user kind of navigating from an employee perspective what that user experience is and so as we start to head through the user experience there's a couple what we call key commands i don't want to call it keywords because that gets confusing with how we discover the topic so the key commands are really there to help guide and navigate the user through the virtual agent experience you can configure these modify these but these are the ones that come out of the box and you can see if you have live agent configured there's one for live agent connect so as the user goes through the experience they can start to interact with these so if i type help as my end user best i can get some great tips here and i can see oh yeah if i type hi it starts the conversation restarts uh restart is begin a new conversation log out so these are really helpful for me to know um but i want to continue the conversation and go through the user experience so i'm just going to use natural language understanding and i'm going to initiate a custom topic that we've built that kind of showcases the power of virtual agent and so when best goes to request some paid time off and wants to initiate that process right from teams after she's made her update to the it ticket she can go ahead and initiate that request right from here as opposed to navigating across different systems to do that or phoning a friend in hr and so she's requested her pto and that topic should come up submit it the keyword way alright so no you don't want this information all right nope we're not going to speak with a live agent so let's try it from here so we're going to view and request pto and she's prompted with so this is actually a static choice output so you could see some of the different types of builders in action and so we're going to have best request a simple leave and once she requests that it says what type of leave are you requesting simple okay so let's initiate a new one here yes so we're going to say best has a question about a paycheck looks like i was testing that i didn't complete that one so we're going to go through the payroll discrepancy and this is an out of box topic for hr so you can see what that experience is i can say no you know i i can peruse different knowledge articles but if i actually want a result here i can say okay um i can either copy paste my pay stub or select the date that that pay stub was in question so i can say january 15th maybe i didn't receive enough overtime so i can say my pay looks wrong and so we're going to assume she was underpaid usually people don't contact or make a request if they're overpaid so you can see best has a payroll case we can see that nice card output here and i'm just going to say no there's nothing else that we can assist with and see we can get a survey here so notice the images is a bit larger than on portal so you just want to make sure if you have a large image pop up if you want to scale that back that's fine and we're going to end that conversation here so she could type hi but one thing to note on how to configure that if you go back to messaging apps integration and we look at this teams tenant installation you can configure these different commands over here so this is where i could say instead of restart i could use something different like new new topic um instead of buy i could say end so these are just some different ways as an administrator you could go ahead and make that experience a bit more personal for your organization so switching hats quickly right troubleshooting tips again this is a paramount importance when you're going through this exercise so some things to be careful of a virtual agent is not responding if you're experiencing any authentication issues or any async issues um so we will we will leave this slide with you um but here's some just best practices from our side on how to resolve any troubleshooting issues so marcel we have a few questions that we can run over them really fast to make sure actually really good questions can teams be used to send proactive questions to employees to prevent calls i think this can be achieved using notification is that right marcel yeah absolutely so notifications can be sent um as well as you can use virtual agent for a variety of different different um you know communication vehicles right so build topics or use notification the other question is about virtual aging integrated with live agent can we say transfer to live agent so i think marcel you came across this uh in during the exercise yes it is possible to interact with the live agent from microsoft teams you have a topic called live agent by one click you will be uh chatting with a live agent yeah and i would say to add to what nabil said most organizations at first when they deploy virtual agent especially if they're coming from a chat strategy already they want to make sure that that a user can connect with a live agent in multiple places in that conversation so you may at first find yourself building ways to connect with a live agent is one of the options in a topic and eventually kind of moving toward that being more in the fallback topic as opposed to something that's kind of an option within each and every topic so that's definitely something organizations kind of do in a phased approach especially if you have a chat strategy today yeah so another question is can virtual agents from different departments for example i.t supply chain hr integrate with a single team integration uh the answer is yes and this is really powerful to do because you save the employee all that headaches from looking for the right portal the right page for submitting something by interacting via text or just asking a question through the virtual agent app in teams you'll be able to achieve that seamlessly um the other question is there is a delay from a virtual agent app to display the answers based on the keyword in teams and default response time so there is a property that you can configure in the instance to mimic a thinking time uh using that you're gonna see that it reflects in the answers did i thank um is the now va through ai or do we have to teach every utterance so with now virtual agent you have a natural language understanding also in the in in the background you don't have to teach every utterance but using set few utterance we can teach it to recognize the other use cases or the other way of people can ask for that muscle do you have more to add than that yeah the best way is to to look at your current records today so your chat records your phone records your case records and look at what are people asking and start using those as collecting different utterances so let's say you decide to build an update task printer issues and a reset password right so you would want to use a broad collection from several different types of employees to make sure there's diversity in your utterances so that all users when they type it in they have a better chance of that intent being recognized just because the model's been trained on a bigger variety of utterances from your data yeah we'll take last two questions um how is multi-language handled so with virtual agent we also have natural language understanding that is enabled embarked by by paris release i think we have french and german and the upcoming release were extending to more languages i'm scrolling through the question there's a lot of great questions here it's really hard to find the only one marcel do you do would you like to kind of confirm again and talk about the licensing because i see a few questions asking yeah and i would say if they're licensing questions the best person is your account representative or customer success manager to handle that because again everybody is on a unique licensing structure so that's really the best place to make sure you have entitlements to virtual agent another question what analytics available after the virtual agent have been used for a while so we have an out-of-the-box dashboard that provides out-of-the-box kpis for the adoption of a virtual agent also over channels or to find the most common use topics that your users used or they did not that dashboard is available out of the box all you need to do is just installing the plugin for that okay um i think that's it we have a lot of questions but please feel free to visit the virtual agent community we um look to see your questions there we try our best to answer them as soon as possible thanks for attending today and thanks marcel thanks sarah i'll see you soon