New ServiceNow Virtual Agent Takes Chat from Conversation to Resolution
Now employees get answers immediately and can open cases directly from chats to make every day work simple, accessible and natural for everyone
On May 9,2018 ServiceNow announced that there is a new chatbot technology called “Virtual Agent”. The bot is designed to improve customer experiences by providing real-time automated resolutions. The Virtual Agent can manage employee or customer request from end-to-end by leveraging the Now Platform. The conversations can be as simple as a request to reset a password to more complex business actions that requires workflows and various integrations.
Interactive conversations between Virtual Agent and employee or customer allows quicker responses and creation of personalized experiences. This, in turn, can free up valuable IT staff time to do higher valued work. ServiceNow estimates that 15% to 20% of routine interactions can be handled by the Virtual Agent.
The Virtual Agent can also be integrated with various messaging platforms to provide familiar experiences for end-users. The acquisition of Parlo, is an indication that ServiceNow is focusing more than ever on natural language understanding (NLU). It plans to integrate this into the Virtual Agents within 2019. NLU allows Virtual Agents to get a better grasped of human language and thus improves the conversational flow between Virtual Agent and end-user by training the bots to understand technical and jargon laden content.
In its pre-built offerings, ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent delivers common service conversations:
IT: Improve employee experience with common help desk requests such as automating password resets, creating an incident, processing approvals and checking outages.
HR: Make it easier for employees to get answers or submit requests such as a leave of absence, research pay discrepancies, check status and update their profile.
Customer Service: Increase customer satisfaction and improve agent efficiency when customers can create cases for products or orders and check product status through virtual agents.
It’s easy to instantly create basic service conversations that resolve issues in large volumes so agents can focus on their most important work. Customers can design their own virtual agent conversations with drag and drop ease and little to no development time. Organizations can easily plug in their preferred messaging service. That includes web, mobile and adapters for popular messaging apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack that are delivered out of the box with the Now Platform.
Virtual Agent will be available in ServiceNow’s next product release this year.
