all right it's a time to start the session hello everyone good morning good afternoon good evening the people who are joining from different time zones welcome to today's conversational interfaces Academy session before I jump into the topic as usual I want to uh talk about our additional resources we have Community forums available for virtual agent nlu we also have forum for agent check AWA and sidebar do visit these forums to see a latest content or find out what other customers questions being posted and how the answers being responded in it or expert from servicenows will also respond if you have any questions that's been posted in the communities each of our conversational interfaces Academy sessions are recorded and posted in our YouTube today's session will also be get posted by tomorrow into the YouTube channel so please do subscribe to our YouTube channel conversational interfaces Academy with that said today's topic is how to get live agent support within Microsoft myself ready I'm an outbound product manager working in conversational interfaces platform products today I have Chris Fulton he's a itsm solution consultant he's going to present how this configuration can be done between Microsoft teams to get the live agent support for any Microsoft teams users to connect with quick highlight about our agenda so Chris will be talking about uh the overview and then he'll also talk about what you need for the plugins and then he'll give the highlights uh high level uh steps for the configurations and some resources then he'll show a demo how the configuration works and at the last five minutes we will leave for Q a if you have any questions during this session please do post your questions in the Q and A panel so that our panelists will try to respond if not at the very end I will also go through those lists so that Chris and myself can help to answer those questions with that said I'm going to hand it over to Chris over to you Chris great thanks Sam welcome everybody looking forward to sharing a lot of information with you today and I'm going to start out with an overview of what it is we're accomplishing on this call once you've gone through this setup what you'll get is essentially what we're showing on the screen today the ideas that our employees are living and working in Microsoft teams on a daily basis and so on the left hand side we have what we call requester somebody asking for help in this case it's Joe one of our employees on the right hand side we have one of our live agents and that could be someone working the service desk or HR or any various different positions within your organization the idea is that we don't want Joe to have to learn yet another interface you're already standardized on Microsoft teams so let's keep them in that interface and allow him to interact and get support So Joe reaches out through the teams interface into micro or into servicenow and he wants to get help in this case because he's got a meeting coming up and he just wants to validate that his catering order is ready now I mentioned that specifically because once he types in his query then the AWA which is noted there right next to a live agent that's the advanced work assignment that's a component within servicenow that basically does the routing of work regardless of what channel it comes in from and I mentioned Joe's asking about catering so obviously we want that to go to the right person that can handle that request as opposed to somebody that might be asking about a password reset so Joe types in his query in teams the advanced work assignment within servicenow takes over to Route it to the right queue and the right person with the skills to answer his question now Beth on the right hand side she responds and says sure let me help you so the conversation starts they're able to work out the issue Beth solves whatever question or query that he has and then they close the conversation this is something we all do in our personal lives every day so it's it's uh you know really about the experience of keeping the employee in the interface Microsoft teams and not having to introduce a new chat interface so that's the overview of what we're going to be setting up and I'll show a demonstration to this live but let's get into what it takes to get this working in your instances so obviously if you're no servicenow there's plugins required to get these different components set up now there's two different sections on this Slide the reason is you may be at a different area in your journey on servicenow than one of your peers and so the prerequisites I put up there because first you need to have the conversational interfaces working in other words you need to have the chat functionality in your instance installed and there's a couple plugins required to do that if you haven't done it already there's the agent chat plugin which basically provides the conversational interface for the agents to be able to have that chat channel available there's the virtual agent plugin and the virtual agent plugin you'll see when I interact in the demonstration that I'm going to asking for a live agent but before that live agent takes over the virtual agent is what I'm interacting with and so that needs to be configured and then lastly the scenario that I'm going to show is an employee reaching out to the service desk for help and so I'm going to be demonstrating this from the Viewpoint of a support desk agent and they're going to be interacting in what we call the service operations workspace which is part of itom and itsm both of those products make use of service operations workspace so once you have the prerequisites going the next thing is to set up Microsoft teams and this is going to take coordination from both the Microsoft teams admin as well as the servicenow admin and we're going to walk through those steps and show primarily what the servicenow team has to do but also discuss what the Microsoft side of this is as well because there is coordination so let's go to the next slide now on that last Slide the last bullet I'm showing a screenshot of what that is and so really the first step in doing this is to install a plug-in which is called servicenow for Microsoft teams it's actually what I call a parent plug-in you'll notice that towards the bottom in the red rectangle it says matching apps for so to get to this I go in and type in plugins within plugins you notice that I search for Microsoft teams I'm presented with this screen here and I could go ahead and click install and allow it to install all four of those apps that are described as part of this but you can also go in and pick and choose which ones if you want to be more selective in other words it's installing support for IT service management HR notify and Microsoft teams meetings if there's one of those or a couple of those you don't want to install you can uncheck those during the installation process or you can leave them all installed it's not going to affect your instance or cause any negative issues next all right so once the plugins are installed now we're going to talk about configuration and this is really where most of the work comes in and it's only a handful of steps but this is where the coordination that I mentioned comes in between the team's admin and the servicenow admin so the very first thing we have to do is we need to have a common integration user created in both systems both on Microsoft side as well as the servicenow site now in step one there it says specifically to create the now msft integration user that is a user that you can choose the name you can call it whatever you'd like if you have a naming standard for integration users that you create please use that if you don't have a name that's a suggested name that we use in a lot of our documentation in fact I'll refer to that user throughout the rest of this presentation in that same name the now Microsoft integration user so step one is really on the Microsoft teams admin side and they need to create a user with the name of their choice and they need to give it the role of application administrator and also when they create that User it's going to create an email address for that user that email address is important because we're going to need it on the servicenow side as we move forward now the next two steps are done in service now and I have some screenshots to go along with this but before we get to those just understand that number two we need to create the user in service now so we'll do that first and then number three we're going to install the teams applications and integration within the servicenow instance there's also a couple links here for you so if you want to follow up there's a knowledge article I'm sorry there's a community article that you can click on and it has some additional instructions similar to what I'm going through with screenshots there's also the product documentation at the bottom so both of those links are available that you can click on when you get this presentation next okay so as a servicenow admin we've already had the Microsoft teams admin create that integration user and they've provided us the email of that integration user now we need to create that user on the servicenow side so we go in as an admin go to user Administration go to users and we click the new button once we've clicked that then we're presented with a form where we type in the username email address various information really the important piece is to creating this user is to make sure that the email address for that user matches what the Microsoft teams administrator provides you from their step and also that this user has the external app install admin role with those two things we're set we can save the user and then move forward to the next step so now that we have the integration user on both sides now we're going to go forward with installing the applications on the servicenow side and So within the filter Navigator as an admin you're going to type in servicenow for Microsoft and then select install Azure apps when you select that you'll be presented with this screen and you just simply click install but notice right above that it says it requires Azure admin access right so you'll be presented uh now we'll go ahead and click install and you'll notice that it wants you to tell it what account you need to you want to use to connect to Microsoft teams in the back end and this is where that coordination comes in between the Microsoft teams admin and yourself as the servicenow admin you notice we're selecting that common user the Microsoft integration once you select that you'll be presented with this screen at the top we get confirmation that everything work from a connection standpoint it's green it says successfully connected and at the bottom you get confirmation that all three components are installed signified by the green check marks so great that piece is done now we move forward and we need to create what's called a manifest now the Manifest is basically a configuration file in a zip format that we're going to share back with the Microsoft teams admin and that way they can install this on the team's interface so the first step is to go back to the filter Navigator as an admin in servicenow type in servicenow for Microsoft and then select now servicenow for teams you'll be presented with this screen and we're going to go ahead and click new because we're creating a brand new manifest now on this screen there's really only one thing to fill out you could change the colors and so forth if if that's your desire but the one field that isn't filled in by default is the version and typically you start with 1.0 and if you redeploy the Manifest again you would do 1.01 and so forth the numbering convention isn't uh isn't specific in other words you can choose what version number and Convention you use but it's there that way you can track the different versions as you deploy the Manifest if you make changes so now we'll hit submit excuse me now we're configuring the virtual agent and there's two options here I would expect that most of you are going to choose the top option this is where we connect teams to a single servicenow instance we do have some customers that have multiple servicenow instances and they would select the bottom option but again my expectation is most of you are going to have that top option which is the default we're going to go ahead and hit next here and now on this tab this is where you have an option if you are familiar with the service portal employee Center employee Center Pro that is the servicenow uh One-Stop shop for employees to go to get self-service you can expose that in Microsoft teams if you would like and the configuration is here so if you enable the tab with that check box then you can give it a tab name on the right hand side and that's free form you can fill that in with whatever name you want to call it and that will expose the employee portal within Microsoft teams as well as the virtual agent that we're going to be demonstrating so I have that enabled and then I hit next and so now the configuration is done and all I have to do is Click download manifest and when I do that it's going to present me with a zip file that's going to be downloaded to my laptop and that I will need to share with the Microsoft teams admin because their next step is this right here this is what it looks like on Microsoft teams admin Center so with that zip file in hand they're going to go to manage apps on the left hand side that's under the teams apps heading once they click manage apps they'll be presented with this where they upload a new app and then they simply select the zip file and click open now once that installs and it does take you know 30 seconds or so to install then they have to set up the policy and this is again where you can decide who gets access to the servicenow components within Microsoft teams so by choosing select setup policies on the left then on the right hand side you can select who gets access by default we expect that most customers do select Global and provide access to everybody but if you want to limit that that's a Microsoft teams decision that you can make and limit that to specific users if you so choose but once we've selected that here the last step is to pin the application to the Microsoft teams interface that way it's easily accessible when I go into Microsoft teams you'll see on the left hand side I'll have an icon that I can select and go right into this so that's it it seems like a lot of steps but they're all very short and simple just clicking through screens and once that's done you'll have your interface you'll have everything set up and and ready to go so I'm going to go ahead and do the demonstration let me take over this screen share okay so hopefully you can see my screen now now I've got two different screens set up here because I'm going to be playing the role of two individuals on the right hand side hopefully you recognize this as Microsoft teams on the left hand side this is my servicenow instance and you'll notice that I've marked myself as available meaning that latch me which is the name of the service desk employee she's available to take chats and on the right hand side again the employee has a question he's got an issue with email he deleted some email and wants to know if he can recover it so he's going to reach out actually if he needs to reach out to a live agent first so that I I so he could have done self-service and that's the path I was going down I sorry about that so he actually wanted a live agent and wanted to skip all of the uh self-help options but you may have heard an audible warning if it was picked up uh it was transferred to a live agent now on the left hand side you can see there was an audible warning and also a visual as well for latch me and it says if you want to accept or reject she's going to accept this chat and now the chat has been connected between Microsoft teams for the employee and on the left hand side the servicenow interface for the support agent now he's going to go ahead and now he's going to tell her that he deleted email and she's of course going to see that on the right now a couple things to notice here on the left hand side where I've got the support agent everything that happened even before she was on this call or accepted the chat all of the Call History all the text going back and forth between the employee and the virtual agent is captured here and so she has a full context of what's been happening with that uh conversation even if it was transferred from another employee or however she got here everything will be there for her to interact with now she sees that he's asked about email and let me give you an example of how she can answer his question within servicenow the chat interface for the agent she has lots of options as you can see she could transfer to another queue maybe it actually is an HR question that he has so she could transfer it to HR she could transfer to another agent specifically maybe uh she's getting ready to to leave for an appointment but she's going to transfer it to one of her colleagues on her same team to be able to take this over so those options are there she could also if the screen sharing option was needed she could start a Microsoft teams meeting couple other options here maybe there's a common response that they always send such as hey I'm looking into your problem I'll be back with you in a moment we have response templates which are those quick responses that they can get to with a few short keystrokes and that will be sent to the user she can request help maybe she needs a manager to assist her and then finally one of the other options is autopilot imagine a common question such as I forgot my password instead of having to deal with that she can send it to an autopilot which basically handles the interaction for her it can ask the questions such as are you on a Mac or a PC get the responses and then give the response to the user about how to update or change their password but in this case we're going to use this last option search KB that is searching the knowledge base and she knows that she's seen an arc article before on deleted email and how to recover that so instead of her having to research Beyond this she's going to point to the existing knowledge article so she selects that press its inner now it say it goes back to the employee here on the right hand side and you can see there's a link now for him to go to the knowledge article and when he selects that it's going to open up another Tab and provide him with a response so this is the experience where the employee never had to leave Microsoft teams the agent doesn't know or care what interface he's using she's just chatting with someone that needs support and in the end she's able to provide support in a consistent way regardless of which way he came in now at this point she's provided him an answer they're all good they can end the conversation and she can go ahead and in this chat now what you'll also notice here that's that's very valuable is that in this record that we're capturing which is called an interaction it automatically updates who it was for who the support agent was how long the interaction lasted but most importantly what happened during that interaction so at any point in the future we can go back and look and say hey what was that question that they asked and what was the answer we had it could also be used as a training exercise from a manager to go back and look and see what happened and provide some oversight for employees so that's the demonstration hopefully that provides you with a good insight as to what this configuration will get you and how you can adopt uh using Microsoft teams as an interface into servicenow so with that I think we can go ahead and open it up for any questions thank you Chris I will go ahead um and shoot you with few questions that came up in Q a and chat uh the first question is what is a version of service now that you're using in your instance for this demo I am on Utah okay and the second one is as with teams integration is there Google Chat integration in place as well to to Archive the scene to achieve the same function in that ecosystem uh I don't believe there is I don't know if there is offhand uh maybe that's something we can follow up on I have not seen a Google Chat integration but that's not to say that there's not something in play that I'm not aware of all right and third question is can we also have the survey enabled for the interactions post conversations is completed uh I can take this answer so yes you do can configure your post-survey charts in the pre uh pre-survey chats all those you will be doing in your virtual designer so whenever the virtual agent starts in teams before it sends uh before we try to looks for the live agent it will trigger the surveys and ask all the list of questions to collect the information from the user and pass it over to the live agent and once the conversation is completed you can also send the post survey questions that how the conversation went is the user got all the answers and what more he feels with the experience all those sort of questions you can configure I'll jump into the next question uh ekta Sharma has asked us when did we set up an interaction to be created and she gave little clarification on that question it could be a case or incident or anything maybe I messed the steps where we set up for an interaction to be created yeah so that's actually part of itsm that setting up of an interaction record um historically we had had what's called a new call record that was part of servicenow but within the uh the modern service now I'll say now that the new call record option has been deprecated we've replaced that with an interaction and that is the default behavior that we have when a new chat comes in because we don't know necessarily what the topic is about now what you may not have seen on the screen since I was sharing two screens from that interaction once we've determined what the employee wants we can then launch into creating an incident or any other type of record within servicenow from that interaction and that interaction then gets linked to that record that we create so a typical scenario is a chat comes in they say I need help with some technical issue the interaction record gets created but from there the agent clicks create incident and the incident gets created and linked to the interaction record foreign next question um we have already in place a traditional integration in our company between Microsoft teams with servicenow using the servicenow app available Microsoft Team Store app is it recommended to change the integration to this way shared because this option slash teams call is not in place nowadays read that last part again I think it was related to the start teams meeting yes okay yeah so so you may be on a different version depending on when you installed that so that would be something that uh maybe reach out to your core account team and they can help you navigate what version you're on of the of the plugins for Microsoft teams and then get that help you with understand maybe what version you need to be on I am on the latest version and I don't have the version number handy off hand but I just installed this last week so it may just be a an issue of versioning yeah oh by the way um one other piece on that if you recall when I set up the uh the very first plug-in um one and it had four different applications it was installing it was I it was teams for itsm teams for HR teams for notify and and Microsoft teams meetings which was one of the plugins I would also check that and make sure you have that plug-in enabled if you don't then go and update your plugins and that should probably fix it and just to add your cruise point if you are using other workspaces like CSM FSM uh ISM so some of these capabilities are specific to those uh workspaces so the best way is check with your account Executives and get all those informations and as Chris suggested I highly recommend you to look into those plugins which you are installing to look for all these capote's I'll jump to the next question can you use remote actions such as clear teams cache from next thing through teams I'm not sure about this yeah I I don't know either we we should probably capture that and uh do a little research then I'm moving to the next question our company wants to implement single chat bot on internal platform and when people ask questions related to service now they want to immediately show exact response what is your recommendations for this use case um I'm I'm trying to make sure I fully understand the question okay I think this is more to implement single chat bot internally on their platforms and they want to display immediate responses as an exact ones like predefined ones and what's the recommendations I think Victor you can answer this one this is I feel this is more towards the virtual agent like if they Implement virtual agents pretty much all those uh predefined responses they can just show it in their chatbot yeah I I don't know where Victor are you there well I'll take a shot at so yeah it that makes sense in that context then essentially the virtual agent has out of the box predefined conversations such as what's the status of my ticket and so forth and so what you'll need to do is to make sure that the different topics that are being asked in the chat have an Associated conversation in the virtual agent and if there are things that are being asked that you're not getting a response from you'll be able to manage that because we do keep track of what things are being asked and the responses from the virtual agent so as a someone owning the chat process you'll see that maybe people are asking about I don't know some type of support issue and it's and there's not a chat conversation and that will give you an opportunity to add that so future queries are responded to automatically so again I would go back and look at virtual agent conversations as a way to support that across are we a little over the time but time virgins sir and the next question is we integrated virtual agent with our teams including live agent however our KBS and topics don't render the same in teams as they do with the virtual agent web client what are we doing wrongly uh I don't know that's necessarily do anything wrong based on the question and not any more context there are configuration items within servicenow to control how the items are rendered within teams so you may have noticed that when I did it and I clicked on the knowledge article it actually rendered it in another tab which gave the native service now rendering of the knowledge article you can also have the option of rendering it as the same place as the parent in other words within Microsoft teams it's hard to say without knowing how you have it configured but there are options for how that how and where the rendering occurs and that's set up under the conversational interfaces application in the next question we have integrated teams and virtual agent after clone PRD to the production to Dev we have hard time to make Dev connect to teams do we need to preserve any tables foreign that would probably be a better question for support or reach out to the community I can I can quickly give an answer to that so if you have two different instances one for the production one for the dev and when you have done your integration with the teams you also need to make sure in your integration which instance that you are uh I mean you're linking with your Microsoft teams maybe you might have just done with the production and not with the dial that might be the issue so I would highly recommend you can raise a ticket without support team they can help you yeah and the next question how do we change the look and feel of the conversation in teens with it depends on what you mean look and feel if if it's the colors and the fonts and so forth within teams that's actually going to be a teams configuration servicenow does not dictate or control the look and feel of the team's interface so when I demonstrated on the right hand side I had that purple uh color for the employee that would be something that the team's administrators would have to to work with great and next question uh so Meg I'm reading your question to make it not so blocky um we need more context too answer this question so you can uh type the further while I take the next questions the next one is if you make any change to a topic in the virtual agent will that also show in teams or does it have to be reconfigured again great great question yeah so you do not um once you so teams is just another window into service now so once you have it integrated and working there's no additional steps so I would say uh a different way the way that it's done whether it's teams or the virtual agent in the portal really doesn't matter it's really about updating the conversation making sure it's saved and published and tested and it will work in all different interfaces and we got the last question Nano videos are not rendering currently correctly in teams virtual agent is this a known issue uh it's not known to me that's not to say that there isn't an issue uh maybe out on our support site that I'm not aware of I feel uh those are a good question to ask to the account your account executies or raise a support ticket let the support team can help you if uh if there is any issue with your configuration so with that said we have covered all the questions and um thank you everyone for joining today's session uh please do uh look out for our recording and post it in our YouTube channel and I'll also posting all the resources that you need in that uh YouTube description and stay tuned for our next Academy session thank you