welcome to the virtual agent academy let's um let's get started so a few logistics um first please visit uh the virtual agent and nlu community site has a lot of great resources for beginners and experts you can ask questions answer questions and see articles written written by our social matter experts we have content such as step-by-step process how to get started best practices the latest content written by product managers and and team and really you can rely on the the hive mind and experience of others ask questions give answers a great website overall if you're uh watching for youtube and you like this content and other content from servicenow hit the subscribe button uh hit that like button feel free to uh put comments in as well and uh for those who are listening to live if you are if you have any questions feel free to ask me anytime just to hit the q a button so today's topic is going to be building uh virtual agent notifications to enhance your workflows so virtual id notifications is not a new feature uh we've had it in our previous release and by previous i mean the paris release but we're going to show you a new spin on notifications and that is available in the upcoming quebec release which is in general availability this week uh which is actual notification so how do you uh not only make your notifications uh pop but also make them actionable and make them use are useful for your uh for your users so presenting is myself victor chen also have with me is uh paul nisseroy uh from the iitsm team and marcel goodsoft from the employee workflows team so this is our briefing this is our gender briefly uh we're going to go over an overview of notifications and then we're going to do some exercises like hands-on live exercises that polymer still going to go through for both an i.t uh use case and an hr use case or hr experiences or channels and then we'll wrap up with the q a and of course you can always ask q a uh in in between in case there's anything you see so first an overview so notifications are um really uh an experience that you may see on your phone but you can now also present and build notifications that users can see not only a virtual agent in your web client for example your service portal but anywhere whether it's slack or or workplace by facebook or microsoft teams notifications uh are enhancing in the quebec released uh in the following manner so uh first thing is you can now unsubscribe and subscribe from notifications uh within channels so if users don't want to get notifications want to pause it for a while you can do that you can also build rich image and record layouts for notifications so instead of a notification just be kind of boring a text or maybe a link you can create one with images you can create one of that reference a record as well and that just provides more uh context or more um a better a more great user experience for uh for those who who see these notifications right as i mentioned you can now practically engage users with actual notifications if you see in the screenshot on the right this is a notification in the slack channel it has an image and it also has buttons for users to act on they can take a survey they can uh you know maybe uh in another example speak to a live agent if they want to uh speak to an agent upon receiving a notification uh et cetera any any actions uh is going to be a virtual agent topic that you can figure and uh finally of course i mean all these enhancements i mentioned whether it's adding images making notifications actionable etc they are available in all uh our supported channels today again that is slack teams workplace and of course again our service portal or our portal of web clients so when you're creating a great notification just some things we want to you know share and keep in mind and this is considered you know good guidance not only you know with servicenow but also in the end industry overall right so the number one of course is don't bombard your users uh you know the more you bombard users with notifications the more likely they are going to ignore them or unsubscribe to them right you want to make your notifications actionable substantive and distinct and that's really you know the you know what you're about to see in the exercises is how servicenow really helps you do that right you want to make sure notifications actionable users can act upon notification rather than just kind of be a passive reader and and digester of the notifications right you want them to be substantive you want them to be important you want to uh to note perhaps a change or an update or something that your users are gonna potentially care about and finally you want to make them distinct right you don't want two or three different notifications for the same change or you know if for example incident is updated you don't want three different incidents or notifications saying the same thing that oh your incident has changed right so you want to make them really uh distinct consider where and who in the workflow should be notified right you don't want to over notify or notify people who may not be relevant to and where in the workflow to notify right uh did you need to do in the beginning when perhaps ticket is created a ticket update or ticket ended right so really consider uh where in this workflow users should be notified for an optimal experience and again for users to most be able to really care and take action on and finally uh capture feedback on the effectiveness and experience of your notifications uh you'll you'll find that users may prefer notifications uh during work hours or maybe off hours uh maybe they don't care if they receive notifications on weekends maybe they do and again of course you know what kind of notifications uh they receive right maybe they care a lot about notifications about a ticket over there as i was updated uh in urgency or in state uh or not so really uh take the time once you've implemented notification really you know start that feedback loop in terms of okay what works and what doesn't and what notification gets a lot of attraction so with that i'm going to turn it over to a paul and we're going to go just go straight into the into the live build of a notification and an action notification so uh paul whenever you're ready feel free to share your screen thank you victor thanks for the for the introduction um so what i'd like to show you in my exercise today is i'm going to create a notification uh i'm going to add some rich content to that notification i'm going to add one or two actions and i'm gonna show you what that notification looks like in the web client uh so we're not gonna touch on the designer for this exercise but i do want to just briefly highlight this notification here or the checkbox here that says enable notifications for all users that's the first step you need to take and alongside with the enable notifications you see some of the other options that are now available allow transcript transcript download for the end users if they want to have a written version of what they chatted in the va show agent names and avatars some of those options are now available but but for now we'll focus on this one enable notifications for all users right so then um where do i create notifications if i type in provider i can see the provider notifications and those are the ones that i want to add one new to here we see a couple of out-of-the-box notifications that are already existing some of them are active some of them are not active i'm going to create a new one from scratch and the use case that i would like to use for today is i would like for the end user to be notified whenever an incident is updated right so if you have an update on an incident a status update on the incident i would like this notification to automatically provide the end user with the information around that so i'm going to hit new uh and i'm going to give my notification a name the name i'm going to choose is insert then change right so i'm going to send off this notification automatically whenever an incident of the specific end user has a change the table i want to run this notification off of is the incident table and i click incident it's already set to active so i don't have to worry about that anymore i want this to be triggered by a record change so whenever a record in my incident table changes i then kick off this notification i don't want it to be kicking off i'm going to insert right that would be when a user just creates a new incident but i do want it to be kicking off when there's an update not all updates i would like for the state to be changed for it to kick off this notification and i can add some conditions like when it changes to a specific state or when it doesn't change to a specific state but all the other states et cetera for now i'm just going to go with whenever the state changes who do i want to send this notification to not to specific users but to specific users in the context of this incident right so users in the field i'm going to look for open buy there it is that's the one i'd like to use so now what i've selected is i would like to create a notification on the incident table whenever a record changes more specifically the state of the record changes the notification then goes to the open buy or the creator of that incident i'm going to save this record so that i see the related list appearing at the bottom so at the bottom i can see notification contents and actions and in the executions i can see later on when there's been some notifications kicked off with which instances of those notifications actually were created i'll start with notification content so this as victor explained is now rich content so i'm going to create some new provider content for my chat to appear and i would like that to be hold notification what i would like to be shared in this notification for my notification incident change is an image card first of all i start with a picture and then i'll add some text to that right and the message i want to be displayed is the incident state has changed please check the status of your incident or anything to that matter right as long as it provides some context to what is expected from the end user to do at this point then let's say i want to use either either a url or upload an image upload an image choose the file that is called notification and i'll add that one uh there it is that's a little image i would like to add to my notification so that's the first thing i'm adding as a message to the end user whenever there's a state update i also want to add some actions right and we can now create actions for this notification so i'll click new provider action and the first action again for virtual agent i'm going to call check oops check ticket status and here's where i can refer to topics right make sure you have your topics uh available and uh published or else they won't appear in this list in this case i want to check the or have the check i.t status topic to be kicked off right so we're just referring to active and published va topics here that's one action item i want to add i'm going to add another one again for virtual agent that i'm going to call chat with someone all right so that's the second option here and here i can see live agent support i can pick that from a list but here it appears in the recently selected ones so live agent support and submit so now what i've done let me before i click update let me go through this again i've created a notification that kicks off whenever the state of my incident changes sends a notification to whoever created that incident it then sends two action items that are preceded by one notification with a nice image i click update and there it is there's my incident change now how do i know when this whether this is actually working in my second tab here i am logged in as a specific user the system administrator who has the va the web client open so let's see if my new notification is actually doing what i'm expecting it to do so go to incidents and it just happened so that i have one incident open for this guy called system administrator now if i hit this double click on this state here i can change the state from new to in progress whenever i do that my state of my incident changes so that should kick off my notification to the owner hit in progress to check that i'm gonna go back to my second tab and i'm gonna see if there's any notification that's going to show up in this uh in this web client of uh of josh who is logged on and here we go there we go so i can see a notification has arrived the incident state has changed that's the text that i added please check the status of your incident there's a little image and really you can put anything here but i thought this was a nice picture to show something is happening i can check i.t status or chat with someone so those are the two action items that i've defined let's go and click the first one check ticket status so that's going to kick off the topic it's going to find the incident right so it's going to provide me with that if that ticket that was updated would you like to add a comment i can i can open up the incident if i want to but i can see now the status is in progress so yes i would like to add a comment i can say please enter your comment thanks for the update and i hit send and then that is added to the incident and that's the end of that notification right so um in summary i've activated notifications i've then created a new one for my incident to be kicked off on a state update whenever the state updates there is one image a bit of text and two action items and as an end user i can see that notification pop up in my web client all right um with that i'm going to hand it over to marcel marcel great thank you paul so i'm going to take the screen from you and for the next segment we are going to cover what those notifications look like in microsoft teams um so as you can see i'm on an incident record here but if we wanted to check what the notification looked like ahead of time we can come in right go under the same menu that paul was showing on notifications and let's just check to see what that notification looks like so i can just type in incident and notice there's a couple different incident notifications here so if it's commented changed i have those as active now best practice is if you have multiple notifications is not to delete but you can set those to false but if we take a peek at the incident change notification in this particular screen what it will show is pretty much the same as is what paul built right there's some actions the user can take um we've you know added it by notifications to be received on open by and state changes so you can see the conditions are very consistent and we can see that there's a notification content and then two actions right so check the status of the ticket or i need to chat with someone maybe i need to provide more context or something is a bit more urgent than initially indicated so coming back into the incident record we can come in and take a look at open incidents and the one i'm particularly interested in is from best so best used virtual agent to log a ticket to say hey i need help installing miro on my laptop so this could be a common issue right maybe there's a new software that you've deployed in your organization and some of the employees need to be able to use it maybe they're having trouble installing it on their machine and so when we take a look at um bess's incident we can comment we can update the state so we can come in and say um sure best please let me know when you're available for a quick uh review of how to install right this could involve mirroring or remote logging in so let's just post that comment and we're gonna update the state to in progress so we're going to make it update to that incident and let's head over to teams but before we do victor did we need to take a quick pause and address some of the questions sorry i was on mute yes i'm just uh trying to address the questions i am uh addressing them um quick pause here uh first off if you if you join late or if you want a recording for this no worries a link for this recording will appear both on the community page uh for virtual agent academy and community and it'll be on youtube so uh don't worry if you wanted to to re replay this in your head right um another question very quickly what happens to the notification if users happen to be in the middle of a conversation that's a good call out so regular so you can create notifications and then you can create actual notifications which is the notification that that paul built right regular notifications without any actions tied to them they will appear even if users are in the middle of a conversation right however actual notifications will not we're obviously not going to like you know have users take actions within a conversation so those notifications don't appear until after a user has ended their previous conversation um let's see uh yeah and then there are some other open questions go ahead uh continue marcel i'm going to try to type these out and i'll speak out speak them out uh as well perhaps when you're when you're done okay sure thanks victor um so i'm i'm in teams now you can see i'm in his best and the reason we're we're sharing this um this capability is a lot of employees are working in collaborative workspaces today and a lot of questions come up around well you know if my team is constantly in these collaborative workspaces like teams and slack and you know places where they're constantly in meetings and you know doing different activities related to their job role how do we reach them and how do we make it not so that they have to navigate elsewhere to see the notification like in pulse scenario if i'm working in teams all day that wouldn't be a great experience if i had to go over to a portal and use the virtual agent and see the information over there it's much easier if it's displayed to me in teams where i'm sitting for most of the day and so while users are camping out in these workspaces you can have the notifications appear where see where it's now displaying the update right so the administrator says hey when are you um ready you know i can help you install that maybe you need to remote into your laptop or your desktop um and at this point i have an update but i also have the same image that that paul had just recently shared on the notifications so from here i can you know check this ticket status or chat um but you can see that i have plenty of information and i didn't have to go you know the burden wasn't on me to go seek it out right i'm in teams so it you know displays i can say yeah i want to view my ticket details maybe i want to um update a status on that right so i can take a look at my ticket which would then bring me over to the portal or from within virtual agent i can come down here in the notification and just say hey i just want to check my ticket status right maybe i'm on a call and i'm trying to do a quick multitasking action so at this point i can check the ticket status and again you know similar to to the experience you saw on the portal it brings me to my ticket number it lets me know the additional comments and if i wanted to add another comment and include that as part of the ticket activity stream i have that capability here so you can see how easy it is for a user to multitask and you know go ahead and add an update to that ticket right so it looks like i pressed something too quickly um but you can see yes i want to add a comment um but this is where i can either you know add a comment through virtual agents or you know i can send a reply here or go over to the portal so i may want to just say thanks josh um i am free in about an hour right so i can just send that comment um back to the ticket reply and so it really makes it easy for people to be able to you know be on their calls and doing their work but also engage and interact with the organization for critical points so maybe the software is something i need to to use for a meeting later in the day um so again i'm not really skipping a beat with work and so this is just kind of sharing what that experience would be like in microsoft teams or collaborative workspace and so i'll switch back over to our powerpoint um and i think that's all we had to share for today so victor did we want to run through some of the q a that's come in in the last few minutes yeah um i'll just uh quickly go over some i'll try to cover as much as i can we're getting lots of q a which is good and as well as in chat so i'll try to address them as soon as i can so or as quickly as i can so um can notifications be set up uh for example notify users if a system is down um you can so if the main triggers for a virtual agent notification as you saw in paul's demo is um isn't either event or record change so for you know i'll use an example of record change if a system being down generates or updates a any table record then the trigger that that will act as a trigger for virtual virtual agent notification and you'll be able to send notifications uh to a user or a set of users or a group of users that the x system is down uh let's see what else here i'm just sorry it's just scrolling through i wish there was a way to get these q a in order or they should be is there a way to see notifications without being signed into the reverse agent unfortunately not i do not believe that a virtual agent notification worked for guest users so you must have be a user assigned to an instance in order to get virtual edge notifications um let's see let's address some of the open ones so i'll i'll answer these live can we have provider notifications configured for servicenow for teams app so yeah i believe uh that's just uh what what marcel showed so these notifications can appear in any uh channel uh both web client like in paul's exercise as well as in teams in marcel's and and slack and workplace etc so let's see can we include ticket variables in the notification i did not see that but these notifications are useful yeah so oh identified information um i'll try to answer the question directly and if i if i don't cover it then then uh you know let me know if you want to clarify so yeah something that we showed i think was in paul's exercise is that yes you can show the record of which the ticket is about or the notification is about so if you're sending a notification that a record has been updated you can you can create that as part of your content or uh or an incident has been uh updated you can show that record as part of your content what you can also do is add an action to say uh hey you know maybe your notification is text only or a text and an image saying you're not uh i'm sorry your uh incident has been updated was like this would you like to see it you can add an action then to see check ticket status or view record and then uh you you know the user can can tap on that if they so choose and they can see that record so i hope that yeah just to add right so you can even add an image that indicates you know if something requires urgent action so maybe you know your organization has visual cues where you want to add an image to that actual notification to say hey action required immediately maybe it's an approval at a specific level or maybe it's you know for for a leader in the organization right so um you know i wouldn't disregard the use of images as well in addition to text to make those notifications more impactful so that it catches the attention of the user yeah absolutely um so let's see um i'll just go in order here does provider notifications also have support for actual notifications yes uh it's it's supported and uh you know paul paul built that example and if you want to a refresh refreshing how he did it i know you know uh showing it once is sometimes not enough once once the recording's available which will be in a couple days you can you can you can see how that's built uh so yeah so like what marcel uh and i just mentioned uh you can create a a a content a notification of content type equals record card and then you can select okay what table does you know records on and then you can select what fields you want to show so when incidents get updated you want to you know notify a user of that you have to show every single field you can show one two three fields and choose which kind of which fields you like and you'll see those so i hope that answers your question and you're right they don't have they don't have to type ours i'm sorry they don't have to tap check ticket status or tap view record you know you have two types two uh content types uh or several including uh text image and record card so record card is the one i'm referring to uh where is the recording for today so yes so um on community um polymer so if you can do me a favorite if you could paste on chat the virtual academy uh page um that that would be great and that article page has all our previous recordings as well as our announcement for today's recording as well so that that is there yep and you go to community and if you go under forums go down to virtual agent and natural language understanding and it's in the promoted topic so you should see virtual agent academy is one of i think it's we have five promoted topics today and so if you just click on the link you can get access to all the replays so that's a great idea if folks in your organization would find this material interesting or you just want to watch the replay or you know maybe at this point you're not in a phase where you know you're deploying this functionality quite yet but you plan to get there in a few months or a few weeks so that's why the replays are so valuable everybody's at different stages of maturity and so we make that content available so as you're ready to consume it it's available great thanks i'll keep going down to the questions uh again keep them coming in either the q a um if if they're in chat i'll i'll have to look at them later i haven't gotten through that to those yet so going on going along with q a so uh let's see uh trish asks not so much notification related but do the teams reaction buttons provide any triggers to virtual agent um no i don't think i don't think so so uh virtual agent notifications are sent out by you know by uh by machine by system and um the emojis don't do anything to them um is it possible to use one teams with two different instances of servicenow um that one i'm not sure i'm not a teams expert marcel would you happen to know yeah so in quebec it's a one-to-one mapping so you want to make sure um you have your one team's tenant linked with one service now instance um it won't let you link multiple instances so that's just something to be mindful of with teams you want to make sure that that's connected to to a single service now instance great thanks and then uh the second question by heli uh will the virtual agent notifications are sorry will the va web client open automatically when the user receives a notification no it it will not we won't it won't expand when they automatically expand when the user gets notification i think that's that's what you mean however um they're they they they will get an audible notice if they have audible notices turned on and you will see like a like an orange button we we didn't show it in the demo but you see like an orange nub on top of your uh virtual agent client button when you get a notification and then if it just happens to be open or maybe the person has an open bus idle you'll get them naturally so it won't automatically expand but you the user will get notified yep and to add to what victor said we have a space on the community it's called the idea portal and it's one of the menu headers in the community and if you see a feature or you rather you see a feature gap that you would like to see in a future release i would encourage you to head over to the idea portal and submit your enhancement request and then that way other customers can upvote that request and we can have some visibility as to how popular that is or how in demand that is um so that's always something we welcome our audience members to do is you know if there's something that you would like to see a more proactive notification or you have a great idea that you know you need to solve for in your organization i would encourage you to log an enhancement request through the idea portal yes seconded um the virtual agent idea portal um needs more ideas frankly and needs and needs it needs more votes so please and you know our product managers love the idea portal and uh they take it as a source of pride in us and uh they they treat it very very importantly when figuring out what to do in the next releases um next question we have notifications out of box with servicenow for teams can those be disables we don't duplicate with these new ones yes you can so uh any notification can be set to set active to false to disable them whether it's the ones that you set up in the provider or notification uh records as you as as paul had shown you or whether it's set up elsewhere i know there are multiple places where you set up where you create and activate notifications and service now so uh yes they all any and all of them can ever can be deactivated in any given time so that to your point you don't want them to be you don't want to use it be bombarded you don't you don't want duplicate notifications so yes that that is possible uh katie asks can you create notifications based on what a user types in for example to inform them about a new ios update they should install if they search something like iphone um i don't believe i don't believe so katie unless uh marcel paul if there's some creative thing i haven't thought of yeah that's actually a great idea for our campaigns feature so if you want to you know proactively notify employees of you know something coming up it could be you know you're migrating software there's a critical update people need to install we have a feature that sits on the hr service delivery side called campaigns um and again it's a it's a actually a universal feature now so um you know organizations can take advantage of that and proactively notify users of what they need to take action on and then virtual agent can be used to support those activities so at this point virtual agent can you know you can have the actionable notifications if someone has an open incident or you know there's something that uh requires a person's action um to follow up with that but those are you know using campaigns and content automation is a great way to supplement your investment with virtual agent you know and really broadcast the information out to users yeah and i'll uh thanks marcel now wrap up katie that um again the the main domain trigger the most direct trigger for virtual agent notifications are record changes so if you you can kind of be creative if you want and say oh if um short description becomes x new ios update then you can fire notifications right so um while while not like a direct approach you could be creative in terms of like how do records get created or updated when you want a certain uh notification or when you want a certain when something changes in your workflow and then that in turn can fire a notification fire off a notification uh kaveri asks if there is bot to bot no integration and an update is coming from another bot will service now virtual agent notify um i i i don't i don't know but yeah if this at this point know since servicenow is a we what we call a child bot still so you know in a future release where we will support primary bot capabilities that could be something we you know we're looking to support but today if you have a notification coming from another system likely it would show in the primary bot um but what you know some organizations do is they'll have the primary bot if they have a bot to bot integration have that primary bot sitting on servicenow and on various pages so that you know it does provide that seamless experience so um that's just one thing to keep in mind and probably a good plug um in two weeks we're doing a session on the virtual agent api bots about integration um but that's definitely something from a design perspective you'd probably want coming from the primary bot if it's a a child bot system update outside of servicenow yes thanks myself i was just thinking the same thing but i was thinking i i was thinking backwards so yes a a notification from servicenow could appear on your primary bot however a notification for your primary bot cannot go to your i may have gotten that backwards never mind scratch that just uh what marcel said but yeah in two weeks we're gonna have a uh api uh product man virtual agent api product manager do a uh community a virtual agent academy on the api definitely join in in two weeks and uh she can answer uh all your api questions including uh what happens for notifications uh you're asking is it available in quebec or rome so virtual agent api or sorry virtual agent servicenow virtually as primary bot we don't have a set timeline of when it's coming out as a secondary bot that's already available as available since the paris release so uh primary uh we we don't have any uh updates there yet all right uh so could you elaborate let me just clear some of these could you elaborate a bit more on integrating teams with more than one instance of servicenow if a company has more than one instance is that really not possible um marcel did you want to take that yeah and that's something where i would encourage you to visit some of the microsoft documentation as well um so from our side it's a one-to-one mapping so what you can do is on some of the test instances have additional teams developer accounts you know just to make sure those linkages work but on our site it's you know in the quebec release of one to one mapping between the team's tenant and the servicenow instance thanks uh let's go over to the chat i know some folks added some questions here so jeffrey asks is there any data on percentage of issues resolved via chat so that's a great question um we because the answer is yes in terms of uh it is tracked currently in our conversational analytics dashboard so in quote in the quebec release we have a brand new analytics dashboard for chat and one of the main metric one of the out of box metrics is was the conversation resolved right yes or no or was or did it have to be transferred to a live agent for resolution so all that's been checked in quebec in in the paris uh analytics dashboard i'm not sure whether or not that's one of the out of box metrics because uh the paris dashboard is is built off performance analytics what that means though because it's built on pa if if it's not there or if you need like a certain flavor of that metric it can be manually built by by by you as in terms of like what you want to track and etc so another plug in four weeks i'm thinking way ahead here we are planning a virtual agent academy on the conversational analytics dashboard for the quebec release for those interested so uh again if you guys register on community you'll get notified of both our api of event in two weeks and then our analytics dashboard event in in four weeks is there a next question from jeffrey is there a difference in chat functions within va and agent workspace um i i will i would probably need elaboration on what we mean by chat functions if by check functions you mean like you know what actions are available for the end user to take then yes agent workspace the agent has different actions that they can take for example quick actions etc that a virtual agent end user does not have just because of the persona the virtual agent end user just is very much end user focused chat whereas agent workspace agent of course you're gonna have a lot more tools you're gonna be able to read or redirect uh threads in case you need help from someone you could again do quick actions or shortcuts etc so there are differences i would uh direct you to our documentation on uh agent workspace that has a lot of you know a good visual on how agent works how the chat experience agent workspace uh is is available or what abilities or capabilities are there great these are great questions thank you you know we love hearing these questions and interacting again if you have any other questions um you know you feel free to put them on community and where the power of our communities not just me marcel and paul but anyone could uh answer and help you out with your questions and um also um yeah again uh community is the place to be um that's all i had uh paul paul marcel anything you guys wanted to wrap up with just wanted to thank the audience for their engagement today i mean you guys are what really make these academy sessions so we love hearing from you we love the engagement um and we look forward to seeing you in two weeks yes thank you everyone uh see you all in two weeks tell your colleagues tell your friends and again the recording will be available in a couple days thank you everyone