good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone super excited to welcome you for our july session on employee center academy i'm dialing in from seattle as always please let me know where you're dialing on from it's very exciting to hear from people from all over the world in these sessions please feel free to use the chat for that um so let's get started because we are already five minutes past and again a very warm welcome to the july session for employee center academy we will be talking on multi-department and unified virtual agent today all right a few more things as you all are familiar we have a pretty awesome employee center community where we post a lot of content lot of faqs and and guidance that um that generally organizations seek for are available in community so definitely a good place to uh to access for all your questions and then we recently launched a new now learning course on employee center so if there's anyone in your organization who is learning to who's looking to learn more about employee center i highly recommend this course it's free it's available on demand and can be accessed through now learning and then additionally we also have now create resources to help you self self deploy employee center and then all the recordings are also available on as a youtube playlist um you have to go on now community and and just search for employee center in it um you will see all these links shared by srita in our chat so feel free to access them all right so organizations that are deploying employee center and especially deploying it as a multi-department uh portal are often asking us how do they unify the virtual agent experience so they can create a seamless interaction and and navigate their employees to i.t hr legal or any of the other departments that they are seeking help from um it's a question that we have very commonly received so i'm very very happy to like you know have a focused session on helping you get started with a unified virtual agent and we have a house of different uh experts on this topic um the the the conversation will be led by victor chen who is the outbound product manager for virtual agent but we also have additional experts on the line who will be answering your questions via the q a panel i'm going to hand it over to victor now who is awesome and is really great in this topic so please please do ask your questions on this victor over to you awesome thanks bruja i'm going to switch the screen share if you don't mind in just one second awesome so yeah let me know if you don't see my screen but i have the slide systems here once again like we just said my name is victor for those of you who attend the virtual agent academy i probably sound very familiar because i also do the virtual agent academy so great to talk about multi-department unified virtual agent on the employee center if you attended last week's virtual agent academy i'd share something very similar to what you're going to see today so there will be some review but we're also expanding it outwards and obviously adding that employee center slash hr context uh with all the folks other folks on the call who can take your questions so let's get started just a brief agenda we're going to briefly go over the va introduction introduction into advanced work assignment as well then a slide on just general guidance on what we're trying to accomplish today and then we'll jump right into the exercise if you have any questions put them in the q a panel and um i'll either try to take a peek at it or um puja or the folks on the call could help ask them to me and i could address them cool so with that said let's talk about the virtual agent for so for those of you who don't know the virtual agent does provide your users with a frictionless omni-channel path to resolution right so the virtual agent meet your users where they are with their client of choice so yes it could also it could mean employee center but it could also mean teams slack or mobile app or more traditional channels such as portal email phone etc right and the advantage that our virtual agent conveys to you is that it's native to the now platform so what that means is it uses your data your users your cmdb your knowledge base and as an intelligent layer to provide personalization automation and answers so the virtual engine can connect to your current servicenow apps and workflows which is your existing investment and it integrates with any third-party enterprise system via our integration hub so this provides a cohesive enterprise experience you know in a single powerful chat interface okay and then let's say where the virtual agent is unable to resolve an issue the conversation can be routed then to the right live agent via intelligent routing so then let's talk about that intelligent routing so we have what is called advanced work assignment so when it comes to resolving issues obviously you know you need efficiency you need speed and when a user is routed to a live agent you know we we're going to try to route to the right live agent at the right time okay so if you have an hr question you want an hr agent if you have an i.t question you want an i.t agent okay and so it becomes vital that the next interaction they have that next person they talk to is the person most likely to resolve their you know resolve their be able to resolve their concerns so this is where advanced work assignment comes in it routes your incoming work and you know in our context that work is chat but it will also route tickets as well it routes it to a relevant queue and then in those queues there are agent groups and then in within those agent groups for agents and depending on the availability whether it's geographic ability or personnel availability it will route it and or skills you know does a person have right skills answer those questions they'll route to the right person uh automatically okay so everything i've talked about is in the platform in servicenow already native to servicenow okay so then let's talk a bit more about what our our goals for today so you know when we talk about multi-departmental virtual agent it's important to stress that we're still talking about one virtual agent so you know while in other use cases you may hear that there is a hr bot and an it bot but a servicenow it is really one bot that can handle multiple use cases it addresses multi different workflows whether it's it hr finance legal et cetera but with that said there are some things to consider right so when it comes to administering the virtual agent of course the your it group and your hr group are going to want some division of labor just for consistency's sake and to make sure that people are stopping each other's toes and the way to do that the way to control that is via scopes okay so you want to have your i.t topics and conversations and your hr topics con in conversations and configuration in in different scopes so that each service desk or each group can manage the virtual agent separately yet to the user it still remains one virtual agent that can address practically any question okay so when you use scopes some things to control within different scopes is of course your process owner and your agent to user roles and we're going to go over that we're going to go over this in a minute in any exercise but just wanted to briefly call this out so your roles your virtual agent topics are going to be in different scopes your nlu models if you're using nlu will be in different scopes your agent cues and then your interaction records will be different scopes and that's going to be important because you want to make sure that your interaction records are secured so that so that so that not every admin can read them so for example if you have hr conversations that are sensitive in nature you won't have uh it agents or or other folks uh having access to them even though they will technically have access to the interaction table and we'll see how that's gonna be done in a minute as well in terms of relevant plugins these are some of the prerequisites for what i'm going to be speaking on of course you'll need uh employee center or what i recommend in placenta pro virtual agent uh you'll need that installed and if you are on a pro or enterprise sku you will have ax you have access to virtual agent uh we will be talking about a little bit about some itsm and hrsd virtual agent conversations these are both store applications that you can download uh via was it service store.servicenow.com yes and that basically accelerates your time to value so rather than you building every conversation manually or every topic manually we provide you with dozens of out-of-box topics you can use and duplicate right off the gate and i'll show you in some examples of that later as well and then of course advanced work excitement for hrsm this is another plugin that will provide you some of those agent cues i'm talking about that are also appropriately scoped and i'll show you that in a minute as well okay so with that uh oh a quick shout out before we go any further um my world is virtual agent so please feel free to visit the virtual agent niu community you can just uh go to that bitly link that you see up there there you can see all our latest resources about virtual agent nlu we also talk about agent chat and aw there awa there as well so feel free to visit there give questions or post questions give answers etc and if you like what you're seeing um uh you know you click that like subscribe button if you're watching the employee center video still click the like subscribe button but uh definitely feel free to visit our virtual agent academy uh we do academies every other tuesday so uh not this tuesday but we did it last tuesday and we'll do it next tuesday so go to that bitly link to view our playlist the community page has the link there to register under that virtual agent academy tile you see there so if you want to learn more about virtual agent agent chad awa nlu i do my own academy slightly shorter slightly more frequent but all the more all the more interesting to you uh hopefully okay so with that we have a poll so i'm gonna look to i think either peugeot or sweta to post that poll but we really want to know like do you use a virtual agent for more than one department ig both uh both hr and i t right if you're using advanced work assignment for routing what workout items are you currently about right i know a lot of folks are routing chats a good amount of folks are probably routing incidents and cases or other kinds of tickets so we want to learn about that and then how many asian chat groups are you currently using in other words how many um groups are different agent groups are answering your live chats or answer addressing your incident tickets right is that just one group or do you have multiple okay so we'll pause uh you know for a couple seconds for you to answer the questions i as a host of panelists can vote so i'm not going to skew the results but after a while you could probably just show the results or share the results people can see how the group responded in the meanwhile i'll just check q a real quick sounds like everything is getting answered but if there's any other questions then you know feel free to have people can ask them to me feel free to raise your hand if you want to just ask your question so yeah i'm just going to read through some of the questions that my colleagues have answered already how do i ensure that it uses router to either an hr sdl itsm life agent we're gonna show that so stay tuned uh what is the best practice to mark an interaction you're brian you are way ahead of us we're gonna we're gonna show that right to you if the organization doesn't have a unified portal they have each their own portals the technology still treated as one virtual agent um if the instances are different they're different so it's one bot per instance so if you have if you have separate portals you know i can go this at the end because we're you know we're talking about unified portals here but if you have separate portals it is still one virtual agent but you can create different experiences right so different greetings different brandings i will allude to it very briefly but um it is still one virtual agent in the background just presenting to you different front-end experiences and charles you made a very interesting um comment in chat you're saying that you haven't moved to chat support yet and it doesn't quite fit your culture you want to expand on that uh hello are you here yeah yes um yeah it's we're still kind of on email because where we are in our culture the interaction with our id department is it's not it's not phone actually phone is very secondary but email and posting on their incidents and things on the portal is is primarily the way and i'm you know looking at the uh you know i've been being in this employee center you know like i'm looking to transition to the employee center but when it comes to like the virtual agent part yeah they don't chat or teams is more of a back channel to to the itt help desk okay it's not that it's a shadow but that being said how the i.t department interacts is like a chat you know it's it's like we put the chat mechanism on to in any email kind of way interesting a lot of our organizations that are especially deploying employee center are moving away from emails and are quite heavily dependent on doing triage or some deflection using virtual agent um hopefully as you can i ask so the so i've been looking at it i guess as a just through a more lip classification like you know clearly defining you know portal uh or record producers or you know but moving to like a sub ticket like the interaction table you know really for that triage but does the does the virtual agent see that interaction table the same that it does with the the incident because lately i've been seeing the virtual agent start closing tickets and making action uh just in in our email in our incident so like it's live it's kind of cool actually i i let victor address this and victor maybe you want to expand this to address two things like one how does they just touch upon the value that virtual agent and agent chad provide and how that can help reduce um the call volume and the value that provides in general uh in terms of tracking and supporting so if you can just touch upon that a little bit more then that would be a good good topic to just expand on sure yeah and i'll go back to this slide here um basically uh yeah defusa's point the one of the drivers for a virtual agent or that organizations deploy a chat by virtual agent is to drive down the volume of incidents and tickets that your live service desk uh has to deal with whether it's via email or phone or just to incident volume right so there are a variety there are you know one of the ways is of course to present the virtual agent um whether it's in teams or or slack whichever chat app you guys are you know you're using or via the portal to address your most you know common uh call drivers uh whether that's just you know the ins the status of a ticket or to reset your password or you're having issues with email vpn or a chat app so you know there's we have a variety of ways to also make sure that the virtual agent is addressing your most common call drivers right in terms of like how that happens uh one is of course the administrator has probably has some inkling or idea of what are those most common call drivers if they know for you know f with five seven years of experience they know that the most common call drivers that they want to automate away is password reset then the itsm um one of the you know the itsm store app has has that capability right or you know that come open enrollment time um health benefits questions are the most common and they need you know everyone needs to be sent a link or a nard article with links like you can create a virtual agent conversation to do that as well if someone asks for uh asks for that information um the other way uh we the virtualization can surface itself and this is getting more advanced features is a feature called issue auto resolution so if you were to look that up on our in our documentation page we're not going to go over today but very briefly what that does it uses channels uh you know using let's just say uh create a ticket for example if i created if i if i create a ticket saying like i have issues with my vpn i can't connect when you create that ticket the our you know our virtual agent in the background and it sounds like what the previous gentleman was saying our virtualization in the background if we can help you with that ticket we actually reach out to you via teams uh or via a notification on in the virtual agent window saying hey we saw that you submitted this ticket can i help can i the virtual agent help you and these are gonna say oh yes please help me or no i prefer a real person to help me but again if if you can just deflect as much as possible uh your high call volumes you know away from live people's they can count you know so that they can uh concentrate on more important issues then uh the virtualization could take that load off for you a lot hope that answers your questions perhaps in a in a long form format cool in the interest of time how about we jump to the exercise we can do more q a at the end as well so let me uh skip skip skip get the poll thank you for for doing the polo it seems like about 45 percent of you are using va for more than one department which is great to hear um and we're gonna you know go into a little bit about that all right here we are let me know if you don't see it but i'm going to start here and i'm going to make sure my other windows because i'm going to be i'm going to talk to live agents and i need them in separate windows okay those are all set up so the first thing i want to show is how to con how to do that live agent routing so someone asked that and and that's you know partly what you're going to have to or one of the things you have to do when you have a unified experience so let me first show you what i'm talking about and then i'll show you how to build it okay so i'm here in the employee center right and the virtual agent included out of box for you automatically when you have when you have employee center and you can see that um it has it's going to say hello to me it's going to know personalized right knows my name it's going to show me how many open issues i have and i have tons because i'm an admin and then it has what we call promoted topics and you see you can have a combination of both hr topics and iet topics and promoted topics and what promoted basically means promoted basically means painted topics so rather than someone having to type something that you know say hey i need this if you know that there's a very important or very popular conversation people want you could pin it to the top and someone could just click it without you know you having to without anyone having to type anything right but let's say someone has a question that they really want a live agent for or at some point during conversation they have that so if i were to you know ask for a live agent either the top here or request in the live agent here i'm going to ask the person because i'm a unified experience i don't know yet whether or not the person is has an hr and i t issue so i'm going to ask the person i'm going to ask someone hey is your question concerning hrit and based on this i'm going to be able to route someone to an hr agent or an i.t agent okay so let me show how that's done i'm going to let me see if i can i'll just do hr real quick uh i'll say reject we'll we'll talk to the hr agent in a little bit let's end the conversation there okay so the first thing we got to do is set a variable called application and i'll show you where that's done so i'm going to what is called the conversational home page so if i were to go to all and go to type this conversation you know it's going to be one of the first thing conversational interfaces home okay i favorited it you should too no pressure but yeah once you click on that it's going to open a new window called this and this is where i set up all my virtual agent agent chad goodness okay it has quick links for me to go to my virtual agent designer which we're going to use in a moment so i might as well just open that now in the background get recommended topics analytics uh set up my bot greetings okay and then my set up my branding okay so let me first show you uh what i mean by application variables so i'm so in general chat setting in general we have context variables okay so if i view this i want to make sure i have the application variable okay i can create it if it's not there but i think it should be there out of box for you and then another variable to keep in mind back your head is hr topic id variable okay again if it's not there you can create it but it should be available to out of box okay so that's step one so then we gotta create that um uh topic that routes the user to the live agent and i ask the person hey did you want hrit okay so in order to do that i go to the virtual agent designer okay now we already have a topic that just routes someone to a live agent it's called live agent support that's out of box it's it's read-only it's a setup topic what i've done and what this basically does i'll show you is it just wraps the user to an agent easy peasy right but we need something a little bit more we need a wrinkle to this right so what i did is i duplicated this topic and i gave it another name called unified my veda support okay so when i duplicate the topic i can begin to modify and this is what i've done to it so the first thing i've done is i created a static choice right this is is your question return concerning hrit and i've created two labels or two choices right hr or it okay then create a decision tree and if the person selected hr right if the what they per selected is hr then i take them to this script block if i go to i t it's the script block within the script block this is a script actually yeah script action output this is basically what i do i do two things number one i set the application variable to hr okay and then i and then i connect to the agent all right so you know you can copy this when you watch the video but this function at least will be available to you in the original topic the one i showed you just previously but the real you know difference is this line here okay and then if i connect to i t you can probably guess what i did there application variable equals i t semicolon v system dot connect to agent okay the next thing that i have to do is create the queue to make sure that you know when i set the variable application variable to hr it goes this way it variable goes that way right so um i'll stay here for a moment and back to my original instance i'm going to type look at my cues oops and i've created two cues an iet support queue and an hr support scoped queue okay so for my itq i've said to global although you you may have some other queue you want to or some sorry some other scope you want to put that in but for hr support scope i scoped it to the hrsd virtual agent conversation scope now again this is not a box example scope you may have your own but i just did it for just as again as an example you'll see here what i remember what i mentioned earlier those that plug-in advanced work assignment for hrsm if you're to install that uh plug-in we give you a whole bunch of other cues for you to work with out of box if you ever choose to use it payroll queues ops cues etc right but that's just for you know you to to hop to jump onto if you want but i created my own um both these queues are gonna basically be the same i'm not gonna go too deep into awa configuration but i'll show you the important stuff uh got navigate to the right scope here so when i created this queue i made sure that the work item routing condition was context dot application there's that variable again starts with i could have said contained hr right so that means if the application variable equals hr take to them take them to this queue right this key has got this hr support group and then able tutor is in this hr support group okay so two things to note one is the scope that this queue is in and two the applica the the routing condition okay because the queue is in this scope and because the application variable i've i use the application variable uh i'm using it in two ways number one obviously is a writing condition but number two in the system when i uh when i set the application variable to hr that also uh secures the conversation to the hr scope okay we're going to do this again in the virtual agent topic as well but i'm just calling it out here as well application variable has to equal hr and your scope has to be an hr scope uh in order for it to to in order for the conver interaction later on to be skipped to hr okay so that's how to set that up so now let's do the experience and go all the way through okay so i'm back in employee experience i am going to once again ask for an agent and when i do that oh one more thing i have to call it that's important oh you know when i click this button why does it take me to the topic that i set up not the out of box one that i showed you a moment ago let's let's go over that okay so i'm going to go back to this ci homepage and i want to set up this experience so i remember a while ago i answered a question like hey i've got two different portals how do i control that i'll show you how okay so i'm going to go to the ci home page i'm going to set up greetings and you'll see i have a couple records here okay i have one from employ center i once like the old legacy esc we're not going to go over that and i have a default chat experience okay if if this basically is for service portal if nothing else right so i can have different greetings and of behavior for the employ center bot than i do for say the service portal bot okay i'm going to click into the employee center record here um and you'll see the uh it doesn't show the condition here but believe me when it says that it's you know basically if portal equals employee center do this behavior okay so for setup topics for the greeting i've i've used a dynamic grading topic that's why it says hello wendy that's why it shows me all the all the incidents i have and then for a live agent i've selected the unified live agent support that's the topic that i created that ask hr or it okay so you want to set that up here and then for promoted topics this is where i set up the check id ticket status and the 401k benefits inquiry as those pinned topics you set that up here i could add more if i wanted to but i usually keep it around three to four i think five is the max but you just want to kind of keep it solid there okay so yeah that's where where i set up the setup topics including the that new one i created and then promoted topics that's where i set that up okay so let's go back so yeah i clicked that top three dot menu it's is it is your question concerning hrit let's say it's hr so it's going to route me to my hr agent you don't see this it's off screen but it's going to route and able tutor is going to accept because able is my hr guy and you know i'll say hey hi i need hr help and able say back sure i can help with hr stuff okay a little bit back and forth i'm going to now go ahead and end this conversation uh i'll end it on able's side so able's left the chat at close so now you know they just had a conversation with an hr agent this should this interaction should be scoped to hr let me show you what that means so i'm gonna go back to my uh instance here i'm gonna go go to the interaction table click on all and you'll see that the conversation i just had with abel has been scoped to this hr sd via conversations script that i set in that queue okay i'm admin so i can see this but if i were to if i didn't impersonate to someone who was not admin i had more of a you know an i.t role like beth let me impersonate her i will not see it and i'll show you what i'll show you what it will look like i'll go to the interaction table for beth again i'm impersonated and you see all i see are the global scoped interactions the ones with you know a virtual agent or maybe with um you know here's abel answering a global cue like this one time but every other time it's it's you know my security constraints there's a couple rows removed those are the hrsd um scoped rows because i'm beth all right so i'm going to end the impersonation go back to admin so that's how i route and secure live agent conversations okay next i'm going to show you how to do that virtual agent topics okay so again the first thing you want to do is excuse me let's start from the designer i'm going to go i'm going to go back to virtual agent designer here and is you know install that plug-in i mentioned earlier the hrsd virtual agent conversation plug-in and then if i were to select hrsd you know these are just some of them okay now i'm gonna pick that 401k topic i showed you earlier so this is the topic of box one what i've done is you know this is a template so what i've done is i've duplicated it to create create my own 401k benefits topic i've also placed it in the hr sd for virtually scope so let me just switch scopes for a moment and darn it i cannot do it via the designer give me one second no problem i'll just switch it here hr hr something here is go back to the designer favorites is a beautiful thing use your favorites let me go back to the 401k topic here so i did not make any changes to the topic itself or the topic flow itself if i wanted to i can i can change little things here and there that's the what's the beauty of you know creating your own topic out of the outer box topic but i did make some changes or i did check two things if i want uh if a user uses this topic to ask about the 401k obviously you wanted scope secure to your hr scope okay now there are two ways to you know there are three things you got to do to make sure that happens one like i said is to put your topic in the hr scope the other benefit of doing this is as you just kind of saw if i'm an i.t person or i'm an iot service desk i would not be able to change or touch these topics because i probably get that message like hey i gotta you know you gotta switch the hr scope if you don't have access to the hr scope they're not gonna be able to touch it okay you'll be lucky to even see it i don't even know if that's if it's it's visible to people another scope but you certainly will not be able to edit it okay so a scope b variable so in the lower lower left hand corner here these uh variables have are coming into play again okay a live agent application variable guess what value that needs to be hr you got it okay number two your hr topic id now your hr topic id has to equal the sys id of the topic uh in the table sys cb topic what does that mean let me show you so i'm going to duplicate i'm going to open up another window here i'm gonna go to sis underscore cb underscore topic 401k i just right click and copy cis id okay once i copy the sys id i just paste it into this right here now uh word of caution if i duplicated this topic from an out of box topic this variable will this variable will already be filled out but it can be filled out with the templates society you don't want the templates this id you want the new duplicated topics sys id you see there are two rows here there's a template one and then one there's the one i created like you know four months later you want this cis id so you're going to do some replace just copy paste overwrite the to make sure that this id is your real topic sys id okay once you do that you click save you click publish all that good stuff and then uh i can i can go back to here oh i've i i think when i impersonated it just logged me in and out so i'm going to restart the bot here you know i'll just access this 401k benefits inquiry what it first does it shows me some knowledge results like hey do these benefits related knowledge articles help you let's say it doesn't i'll click i'm done uh let's say it doesn't it'll you know go it'll ask me to uh log a case but it'll ask me like who my service provider is right fidelity bank of america morgan stanley etc you know i'll i've got i've done it a little bit i won't do the whole thing i'll end the conversation here and i'll go once again to the interaction table and it should also be scoped to the hrsd uh conversation and indeed it does this time this is center virtual agent uh this is my latest conversation all close complete also scope to the hrsd conversations and uh uh therefore not visible to almost to you know to just anyone right um so with that said even though we covered a lot of hr what this bucket also do is address it questions right so if i have email issues it can use it you know it could use nlu there are two nlu models that play here there's the hr one and the it one right the hr one has um all your hr related topics your ipnlu model has your i2 related topics it's you know i recognize that i'm i have email issues it does this as well uh let me just go through this flow this conversation will not be scoped to hr because it does not have all the configuration that we just went over but it does um you know this bot can address your i.t questions so it can do both uh yeah it was good of course it was good so those are my prepared remarks uh hope that helps kind of you know clarify crystallize what you can do with them with you know a unified virtual agent that can still address multiple departments uh for example iot hr all within employee center so again uh you know it's the same back end but with different front-end experiences whether it's an employee center experience that's more unified or if you you know still using a service portal for your it questions you can have a different greetings different branding even with your iet portal etc so with that i'll take a pause and i'll open up the questions we've been getting a lot of interesting questions and folks have been answering them pre pretty regularly one of the themes that i noticed was more around adoption so let's say an organization um currently is ready to adopt va for it not ready to adopt for hr or they are open to adopt awa but sorry agent chat and not ready for virtual agent could you comment on how different and how different adoption paths that different organizations could take and and what are the considerations um for those yeah sure so you know asian chat is probably a good first step just to get that muscle memory working in your organization and say hey there is a chat available to uh your users right whether it's via portal or again via your chat app slack or teams and then for virtual agent it's it's completely fine to start with just one department first let's for example your your i.t department right making sure again that they are working within a scope now they may initially use the global scope as a form of shorthand or that's just available you know automatically but you want to use an i.t scope when designing your h your iit conversations so that when it comes time to onboard different departments they're not you know touching things that that's already there that's the it department or your initial department is already using so when you duplicate topics i didn't show this but again it's good practice when you duplicate topics instead of duplicate instead of duplicating it into the global scope you should be duplicating it into the an iot scope whether that's you know our out-of-box id scope that we provide to you or your own custom scope that you're probably using for your own things and that way when the hr desk or when the legal desk comes in they're not touching your things right there may be some universal topics that you would want to keep in a global scope obviously your you know your greetings topic your you know good your hello goodbye your search fallback topics those are probably all good candidates for like a global scope but otherwise you'd want to keep your let's say your custom topics or your more specific topics scoped awesome thanks victor i'm just um looking at um the chat i do see a hand raised draw did you have a question you want to bring up yeah thanks um victor my question actually is more morally related to the unified um virtual agent topic that you created so i noticed in the topic that um after your decision um you have the hr or it um yeah choices there and my question is why why did you choose to um use the script action uh as opposed to just using one uh topic block and then calling the the live agent tran transfer to a live agent topic block i could i could have done that um i was trying to i was trying to be very like uh methodical and heavy-handed instead of elegantly using topic blood just as for example purposes but if i were to go into the topic block you'll see it's very familiar so this is the topic block and basically it just says hey do you want to connect to a live agent yes or no and the yes branch in this topic block here it basically does the same thing it says it's connect to agent so in the back end like at the end of the day we're still using this function to connect you to the agent uh i just wanted to call out you know very very explicitly that's why i was kind of you know doing it the long hand approach and and if we if you if customers are not duplicating the the live agent support topic and then and then doing this which which this is awesome by the way but if they're not doing that what agent is there what's the experience like like if i'm selecting live agent support yeah if you just go if you just go straight to live video support without consideration for cues it's going to go to your default queue and so it's going to follow the general aid you know your general network assignment rules whatever they may be so i don't i'm not even know what my default queue is it's probably the it one but you know it won't it won't be as decisive in routing the agent or the user to the person you necessarily may want them to okay so it's pretty important to for the unified experience to to go this route seems like yeah yeah absolutely it's it's it's a good practice uh even for like let's say focus on uh hr for a second that if you have a different service desk for say payroll versus employee versus benefits versus i don't know taxes like you'd probably want to use queues for that too as well if you're just had a single department right i t hr or it would be like hardware software email whatever right so within one department you can also have you know you should probably also use cues so that like you know you make sure uh and the the your question is better routed to the to an expert or someone who's maybe available on the east coast time versus uk time you know there are a variety of conditions you can use even within one department but for multi-departments definitely one of the things you want to take care of or make sure is you get to the right you know service desk let alone the you know the right sub department so to speak victor i'm seeing another question which is pretty interesting um on the unified live agent support why did you choose to go through a topic instead of creating a pre-chat survey and then have them indicated good good question i could have um the thing with a a pre-chat survey so um so for those of you who don't know so how do i address this i only have five minutes long story short a pre-chat survey shows up at the very beginning so the moment someone you know starts a new conversation it's going to ask them hey what do you want hrit i could have done that and then in that pre-chat survey done the exact same thing ask hrit then route accordingly the experience i chose this was a choice was to first say hi to them and present with them like more of a you know gave them some more control before i asked hey do you want hr or it so that is that is a design choice that you can have in terms of using a pre-chat survey a completely you know acceptable route if you wanted to for my example i just chose to say hi to them first before you know saying hey do you want hrit it being a unified portal i probably want to do this because i don't know ahead of time and i want to give them that choice um you know here as opposed to kind of you know without for lack of a better term because holding them into only an hr flow even though they may have you know they may want to you know do it later so it's completely it's you know it's completely fine i just didn't do it as a choice and then if you want to uh if for those of you who want to look into pre-chat surveys just set it up in a say home page here let's see where is it maybe general yeah pre-chat surveys and yeah i've set up yeah you have set it up here before as well as an example so completely you know totally fine if you wanted to i just didn't have a choice thanks victor then uh a generic question the va system class that you used um in script is that documented somewhere i'm assuming product talks but wanted you to comment on it yes it is so if you go to docs.searchnow.com um i don't know the exact page url but if you just search virtual agent scripts every method including the one i just used is documented there or at least every supported method there may be some like you know um very esoteric ones that you might have seen in community by an article by mark mark rodolf whom i i'm speaking terms with but all our supported ones that i know for sure for for a fact work are documented there so all your system methods and then there's some other ones as well contact variables as well are all documented there okay thanks victor and then another question it says is the item showcasing the amount of open cases a configuration when setting up the agent it is um so well let me let me show you what it is and then hopefully that answers your question so remember i said that was a dynamic greetings topic that is actually available from the itsm virtual agent conversations um package or store app so it's it's called i kind of duplicated it right it's called dynamic green these topic vc uh i did not build this i just configured this i duplicated it and then i added this as my greetings from playcenter and it does it automatically so there is a yeah i think it's in here or somewhere that does this automatically for me if i wanted to remove this i could just you know i just go into here and you know tear it all out but if you if you want to have it in here which is always nice um then it's here available for you when the user only has let me see if i could impersonate say beth when these only has like a couple i think it shows it to you automatically but i'm not i don't quite remember okay 14 that's a little better but if i if i click 14 it actually opens up my uh portal here service portal in this case but portal here to show all my incidents as well so whether or not this shows up for you is configurable i just go into the topic here and you know i can i can just modify it modify or play it around here awesome thanks victor we are getting to the end of our uh discussion and i and i did want to point out one thing there are many questions that you guys are asking are actually addressed in the virtual agent community and the faqs over there in fact the academy sessions that victor does dive quite deep into nlu um and and other configurations that he has he was doing and showcasing today so i highly recommend you to go through the virtual agent academy session and if you are not able to use the urls that we shared on chat it's very simple to find them just call community and on forums and you can just search for virtual agent and natural language understanding and you will be able to navigate to the academy session to the faqs and and all the other guides and and extra guidance that is that we our team is producing on virtual agent agent chat and away we will share the recording as well as the q a on our community page so please look out for that and feel free to share it with your team thank you so much everyone for your participation we'll be here for a few more minutes if you want to have you have any additional questions you want to post on q a please feel free to do that thank you so much and have a great rest of your day