hello hello hello welcome on in to another conversational interfaces Academy session today we'll be hearing from the team over at 3C logic regarding their IVs solution so I hope you're excited as always if you have any questions after the session relating to anything to do with like virtual agent ivr we have the community available for you to go in and ask questions find additional resources get help we also post every single virtual agent academy and our on our YouTube page so if you go on to YouTube type virtual agent Academy you should see the playlist there that has just a wealth of kind of um previous Academy sessions relating to agent chat sidebar advanced work assignment you'll see me pop up there in addition to Virtual agents so please take a look at those and with that said I'll pass over to our friends at 3C logic to go through the IBS which thanks Eliza hopefully you can see that there's some stuff here so thanks all that uh are joining my name is Guillaume uh and with me is uh Reuben Rosenthal I uh among other things I'm responsible for our overall strategic relationship with servicenow and Reuben is one of our senior uh Solutions engineer we're going to talk about voice enabling uh virtual agent today but we didn't want to take for granted uh what you may or may not know about um you know what voice enablement a VA might entail so we're just going to spend a little bit of time here about five minutes before we dive into a live demonstration just set some pretens as to why this might be valuable uh and where it might drive interest in uh you know in your world so a quick disclosure uh all right diving in so if we look at Trends um and some of this might be shocking but it is true uh at the end of the day when you look at the voice channel in general um you and if you go ahead and look at some of the research this one being one of the recent studies about 90 of Enterprises today will admit that phone is a primary form of communication obviously they do offer alternative channels but phone remains uh not only a primary form of communication but if you actually dive into the details it's actually for a majority a preferred form of communication now I know for a lot of Enterprises the goal is to try and digitize as much as possible automate and self-service to try and reduce call volume and believe it or not we are on the same uh team in regards to those goals right not everything should result in a call or for that matter not all calls should by default have to go to a live agent but interestingly enough in the last couple years the trend is still been moving upwards so a lot of Enterprise organizations expect that the use of Voice or phone as a form of Channel and communication is likely to rise very few I think it was single digits actually expected to decrease within their respective Enterprises so that's where ivr comes into play now what is an ivr ivr stands for interactive voice response and whether or not you work in a contact center uh today in a past life um just to set some pre-tests what is an ivr for all intents and purposes it is um a workflow in this case a telephony workflow that may leverage different types of prompts or natural language processing natural language understanding to try and understand what might be the purpose of a caller's inquiry and ultimately either match them up with the appropriate live agent or which is what we're going to cover today potentially try and sell service the requests to save the need from having to leverage uh you know valuable human resources a little bit about 3C logic and I'll Breeze through this we are a cloud contact center solution and provider we specialize in all things voice and SMS and I have a very service now Centric solution having been part of the service network system here for a while we have servicenow customers across all of servicenows modules from customer workflows to IT service management to employee workflows so that's your employee service desk your it service team and help desk potentially your customer support group and we've been doing this for Global 2000 companies uh across the globe and while today we're going to focus really on the voice enablement of servicenows virtual agent topics as a conversational ivr right um you know one thing to stress is that it is just a sub component of what we do holistically which is everything and anything that has to do with contact center capabilities whether it's Advanced speech recognition live ivr acds Texas speech speech to text performance analytics call transcriptions call recording and so forth so if after this conversation you'd like to learn more about some of the additional capabilities we bring to bear um happy to do so but obviously what we want to talk about is uh how to voice enable servicenow's virtual agent so before we dive into a live demonstration I'm going to hand it over to Reuben who can sort of use this as a general guideline in terms of exactly what it is that we're going to build and showcase today Reuben alrighty thank you so much let me go ahead and take over here because I know you guys want to see the live demonstration did you want to walk through this diagram a little bit first though oh yeah sure so basically how this the entire architecture Works guys is you can see there's multiple steps to the process so call comes in and essentially 3C logic is acting as a middle layer between the servicenow virtual agent engine and interfacing back with the caller right and how we're doing that is we have a virtual agent application that is taking inputs from the caller using speech to text inputting that into virtual agent and then all of the prompts and configurations that are set up within virtual agent are then translated back to the caller using text-to-speech Technologies right so we are facilitating that back and forth and ultimate But ultimately the entire ivr and and call experience is being configured within virtual agents right and so there are scenarios where using virtual agent you can do self-service and a lot of deflection in which case you don't need a live agent but in the areas where you might need a live agent um similar to how when you have a chat you have that entire transcription in that conversation panel so when it gets to the agent they see that context you would have that same kind of workflow for voice as well perfect so I'm gonna stop sharing my screen so you can share yours Riven and uh while Reuben Potts uh brings up his screen um I'll go ahead and monitor the chat so if you guys have questions I'll I'll try and either respond in the chat or um you know fit them into today's discussion all righty guys so what we'll do here um I'm gonna sort of show you guys what it looks like to build a voice enabled topic from scratch um I I say well I'll say scratching quotes there is a little bit of pre-work that I've done I'm going to get as far as I can and then I have a fully built out flow that I want to show you guys at the end sort of what the experience is like when you call in right so here I have a topic that I've already created it's called hardware issues right the very first thing you want is um as part of the voice integration is you want to have nlu set up so that when topic Discovery is done the person can speak into the phone and the servicenow nlu engine will basically use any utterances intents entities that are mapped within the engine here and ultimately use that to first I guess guide the caller to the topic that at no highest confidence matches their utterance and also can do you can also do more advanced things with entities where hey if I mention that my call is about an iPhone maybe I can skip the question about is this about a mobile phone or an eye or a tablet is this for an Android or an Apple tablet right those kinds of advanced configurations are also available here at the voice part um going to configure the flow here so you can see all the different components that are available not all of these are available for voice integration right so some of them lend themselves to working well with voice some of them just don't make as much sense things like okay a video or an image obviously those types of things are not possible over the phone right so let's go ahead and get started and build out a basic topic flow here so let's say I'll use this static component to start and let's say someone calls in we know they have a hardware issue we don't exactly know what kind of issue it is so let's just say this is we're selecting a category here um The Prompt this is what they're actually going to hear when they call in very first thing after sort of we've found the correct topic for them it sounds like you are having a Hardware issue can you provide the category of this issue all right so we can put in a couple different categories here just for your sake of example I'll do laptop um we can do mobile phone and I'll also throw in other as well right okay so we have a couple different options um and so we want to drill down into this further right I'm not going to build out the entire decision branches um for this example I am going to end up calling about a laptop issue right so what I'll do then um we do want to select sort of okay hey once we know it's a laptop let's see what kind of laptop it is right so I'm going to use the static Choice one more time for this so I'll say okay let's call this device information right and so I can say hey what kind of laptop do you need help with all right so let's give them a couple different options we'll say Lenovo we can say MacBook Pro I'll you know I'll throw in other as always right and so it really is that simple to configure these types of things when you get to this menu option as a caller you're going to hear hey what kind of laptop do you need help with you can say Lenovo MacBook Pro other right and based off of whatever input that person says it's going to be just like a virtual agent chat where someone selects that and that selection is then available for you throughout the rest of your topic flow for decision making right okay so let's um get a little fancier here so let's say okay I know it's a laptop issue I have that category I even have the subcategory that it's a MacBook Pro what if I need additional context right so this call could be about anything from my spilled coffee on my keyboard to my screen is freezing to you know whatever else it might be right so this is a really um good opportunity to get some a text input that's open-ended so that a user can provide hey um let me give you a little more nuanced context on what my issue is all about and then the system can use that context ultimately create an incident ticket for that particular issue right so let's call this additional context right so I'll say please provide additional context for the technician to review and so once that prompt is given it's very much open-ended I can speak and whatever input I put in it's going to then ins it can you can use this context to then you know create that incident ticket right so if I go ahead and say let's do a record action here sorry having some issues with my mouse there we go so let's say I want to create a record I want it to be an incident and now I can add some context about this incident based off of um number one I have the phone number of the person calling in and so we can actually query on that phone number and if we identify a match within either the user table the contact table Etc you can pretty easily associate this to a caller if not you can do an additional verification step that's very common too so you know I'm an employee maybe I'm calling off of a non-regular use phone I call in and we don't recognize the phone number go ahead and ask for that employee ID number ask for that PIN number whatever it might be because ultimately you're going to get a lot better deflection and self-service when you are able to identify the person who's calling in right so let's for put in the caller here and I'll use a variable so I'll say input variables user right um let's say I want the short description of this ticket I can say automated voice request I'll take another input variable I'll say okay this is the device information right this is where I'm identifying hey is it a Macbook is it a Lenovo right let me also add in the context that we just got right so I can say hey look for the description back to those input variables I'm going to put in that additional context right so I can go ahead and save that I'll give it a name create Hardware incident and that is you know a really basic flow you can basically do some deflection with this pretty easily um we can even take this a step further we actually have some 3C logic capabilities in here that can improve the deflection from just purely voice use cases right so things like SMS for example are available so if I wanted to let's say I've created this Hardware incident and then I want to send somebody a text message with a link to their Employee Service portal so that they can follow up even further on that ticket right um you can actually do another record action and I'll do another create record and we actually have a 3C logic SMS utility essentially where I can go in here and I can configure the value of the message right so let's say I did want to send a link to the portal um you can see okay let's say it's it help desk here is your requested link to the portal to review your now I'll be a little bit fancy here whatever type of device you selected incident right and then right here I could put in whatever link I wanted to right so let me go ahead and put that in send SMS Oh missing one piece of information I got the message I obviously want the phone number as well so what I can do put in the contact phone number once again I'm going to go back into here go into the user scroll down to their mobile phone so now we have the phone number we have the message I also want to associate it to the user to make it easy for reporting purposes things like that and so I can set up that user so now we're going to have the message the phone number of the person who's receiving that message and we're associating it with that contact so that you know all the reporting is there every single message that you send through this utility is going to be tracked in a table in service now so that you know when you need to go back and see how many messages who's receiving these messages maybe you want to create a report around all that you would have that information available to you right one additional thing I want to show here guys and then I'm going to jump into sort of what the live phone call looks like we also have 3C logic context control right so what this essentially does is it provides additional context to uh 3C logic so that let's say you have a very nuanced situation I have a call um that caller maybe has a specific language preference they're calling about a very specific set of Hardware or set of software whatever it might be right that additional context is useful to pass back to 3C logic to help out for the agent pop for routing things like that right so what you can do here is actually add in these different values to say hey look you know for whatever additional context I want to pass back to 3C logic I simply use the 3C logic context control utility and it provides it as needed right and that of course is useful if you're trying to transfer to a live agent right Reuben in the event for some reason self-service you've reached the limits and you want to send that to an agent with the context of the conversation up to that point right exactly that's exactly right so you would have this in addition to the transcript of the conversation that the caller had with the ivr as well all right so let me go so I know um so this is sort of just the basic flow here let me go ahead and I'm going to do sort of that cooking show magic where I put everything in the bowl and stick it in the oven and then you sort of see how it looks in terms of final product so this is sort of an expanded version of that same flow I just started with you guys so it's a hardware flow you select a category based off of that input you know it's either mobile phone laptop other we're getting additional context provide the description create a hardware incident um we're going to then ask the person hey do you want a text message to the portal yes or no and if yes let me go ahead and send that text message over and confirm with them right so let me go ahead and I've already activated this published it and everything so let me go ahead and call in here and throw it on speaker so you guys can hear what I'm hearing one caveat I'll put in here voice-based ivrs do require quite a bit of tuning quite a bit of um tinkering in terms of making sure the recognition is just right this is nlu this is AI just like anything else where the more you use it the more accurate it becomes the better the recognition becomes this is a brand new flow right so the recognition is not all the way ramped up on this so just keep that in mind and let me go ahead and call in here and I'll put it on speaker thank you for calling servicenow help deck can you tell me in a few words the reason for your call I'm having issues with my screen freezing on my MacBook Pro it sounds like you were having a hardware issue can you provide the category of this issue you can say laptop mobile phone or other laptop what kind of laptop do you need help with you can say MacBook Pro Lenovo or Surface Book MacBook Pro to help you out a little better would you like to provide a description for the help desk to review please say yes or no yes okay go ahead ever since I upgraded the operating system on my MacBook Pro the screen just keeps freezing I've automatically created a ticket for the help desk to review for your MacBook Pro issue would you like me to send you a text message with the link to your ticket on the service portal for tracking purposes please say yes or no yes sorry I didn't get that could you help me by answering this I've automatically created a ticket for the help desk to review for your MacBook Pro issue would you like me to send you a text message with a link to your ticket on the service portal for tracking purposes please say yes or no yes you should receive an SMS shortly with a link to the portal is there anything else I can assist you with please say yes or no all righty so I've just received a text message with this exact incident ticket and if I actually jump over to the incident table here you can see the request that just got created right automated voice requests MacBook Pro we have that context that I provided the categorization is there the caller is is marked in there as well so that kind of gives you guys an idea it's really you know not a super complicated process once the nlu is in place you it has that ability to sort of baste off of your utterance take you to the right topic and from there it's just a matter of it's really just speech to text text to speech um and you know they're really the world is your oyster using the servicenow data using whatever information you have about your callers that are in the system to then do self-service do deflection and when you can't give the agent the context that they need to service that call quickly and with all the information so Reuben a couple questions coming in the first one from Lauren asking you know can this handle different languages good question Lauren so yes it can um right now we have only rolled out English um but there is the ability to integrate with basically if the if it is a supported language and servicenows nlu then we can integrate with that as well and then we have another question here could the nlu understanding at the beginning be used for some of the flow steps the initial response included MacBook Pro and then was prompted for later uh causing the info to be repeated yes so there is entity mapping available so I didn't set it up for this demo but if you were to set up you know MacBook Pro or MacBook as an entity and then map that over to that component in your flow there is the ability to sort of skip ahead um and the right even is you can have it confirm with the user right so you can say hey look I think you were calling about a Macbook issue is that right yes and it it certainly has that ability to and so that's really where a lot of the power can come from is hey by using that context from the initial um the initial utterance you can skip some menus that they would have otherwise had to deal with and shorten the amount of time that somebody spends sitting in the ibr all right and a couple more here so can they be used to search for articles in the virtual agent so basically whatever is available and um configurable for like a chat use case would be available for a voice use case too right so if you have a configuration set up in your virtual agent where hey you can look up a knowledge article based off of an input let's say somebody types into chat you know oh I'm having issues with my MacBook freezing and you do a knowledge article lookup you can take that top um top search result take the URL for that search result and send a text message with that so that's definitely within the realm of possibility and then we'll just take a couple more here so the um how is a virtual agent topic connected to the call so I think Divya the answer is 3C logic is is that's part of our value proposition right so obviously servicenow does not have its own voice capabilities so we are lending that as part of uh of our broader Enterprise Suite of capabilities to provide the call to call connection the voice transcription uh back and forth when it comes to Texas speech and speech to text um in leveraging Virtual agent as sort of the the engine that's providing the answers but we're facilitating the conversational experience and then of course and this goes to some of the other questions reserving the ability in the event that the workflow is enable or unable to address the issue to be able to Route it into one of our telephony queues within the broader contact center Suite that we offer so that would mean it would go to an agent the agent would get a service down screen pop you could do things like recording the call um and and you know and Beyond in that regard uh we have a question so we'll take two more questions one from Edson I'd say I may need some help it says is this demo all chat was persisted in the transcript field on the interaction table that makes sense to you Reuben yes that does make sense you know what I think showing is telling so let me go ahead and show that here so this is the call I just made and there's your transcription so uh whether it's self-served or it goes to a live agent if it goes to a live agent they would see it the conversation up to the point that it got transferred over and then if it was fully automated that transcription is stored on the interaction for reporting review purposes Etc all right and last question for Kearney will it read knowledge article troubleshooting steps so I'll take a stab at this logically it could you'd have to sort of wonder if that's the best experience maybe sending a text um with the knowledge article if you've identified the the correct one might be a a different uh Avenue but Reuben I'll defer to your your input on that one I'll I would have to agree so we've we've had customers ask us that exact thing I think it it depends um I think you have to write your knowledge articles in a very specific way to make that work generally people want it short and sweet when they're on the phone um it's sort of the last line of defense right um we the business we work in unfortunately people are usually not in the best mood when they call in right so it's really just weighing the pros and cons of you know is that an experience you want people to have so we have a last question and these are somewhat General uh from uh Josh and print uh and so forth uh in terms of setup and difficulty is set up so bear in mind 3C logic is is a technology partner and is for your service now right so um there is a role for us to play uh in in helping you uh set up the 3C logic environment instances and so forth um that's when we would walk through and understand what are your use cases there are things that are very well suited to voice enablement with service style virtual agent um there may be others less so and that's where the rest of our platform can come into play so um if you have an interest in what we've covered so far I would suggest a broader discussion uh and you can reach us at and I'll type it in here at servicenow at 3C logic.com feel free to send over some questions or we can schedule some time and we can certainly dive in and explore sort of what you had in mind and go from there uh okay so Patrick one last question truly the last one uh something about licensing and costs we are a licensed product um in terms of costs again I think we we don't have to understand to what extent and how much of the 3C logic platform you'd want to use um but typically reprice on the basis of virtual agents in this specific use case um although it's not limited to that but feel free to send me uh Patrick uh more questions and I'd be happy to to arrange a discussion with you or or members of our team thank you so much for presenting today guys I think it's a really really neat space really neat demo and I hope you're all excited for that as she said so um if you have any questions um he has posted his email address down in there and we will be posting this video up on YouTube in the next couple of days so you can go back take a look and you know um yeah so thank you so much for attending and I really hope you guys have a really wonderful recipe Tuesday thank you Eliza for having us thank you Coulter uh to the audience we will be at knowledge23 so if you care to meet the team let us know thank you everyone thank you guys bye bye