ServiceNow does have a list of templates that people use, and ServiceNow does not recommend customization. However, customization opens the world to many possibilities. For example, if a company is called ABC, it has certain processes that might not be the same as the processes other companies follow. There is a lot of customization that happens based on your employees and the nature of your work. In the banking domain, things are different. In a service industry, things are different. In manufacturing and healthcare firms, things are different. ServiceNow is able to support those customizations and cater to their employees. I have some customers in Japan and China and also some people in some part of Europe like France and Spain. Not many people understand English. The natural language processing of translation provides things such as Mandarin, Japanese, French and Spanish. These translators can be integrated with ServiceNow Virtual Agent. This gives an additional advantage. If I am an employee who does not understand English, I do not have to be worried because I have the ability to translate and understand what ServiceNow is saying. In this way, ServiceNow is able to attract more customers. A lot of automation is involved. I currently work in the service-based industry, and there is a concept of timesheet where I need to fill the number of hours I have worked on a daily basis. What I have noticed is that two years ago, if a person used to spend about ten minutes to seek particular information, such as reading a knowledge base article, earlier they had to reach out to someone, share the details, that person would read them, do their analysis and get back. ServiceNow Virtual Agent has reduced the time from ten minutes to a maximum of two to three minutes. That is seven minutes saved. The biggest factor that has changed is the whole turnaround time has come down from nearly five to six to seven minutes, which is a lot in the IT industry when you save time. The platform analytics that ServiceNow has enabled in the last one year is another improvement. Earlier people used to use regular reporting and then switch to performance analytics. Performance analytics is much more data-driven and a little tedious to configure. It is not as straightforward as reporting. With platform analytics, ServiceNow has taken all the abilities of performance analytics and put them in basic reporting. People only have to get versed with the new UI of platform analytics and they can create reports in the same way they used to create them. There is no additional learning involved. Bots in general, whatever bots are available in the market, show ServiceNow Virtual Agent has changed the game in the process where it has understood what exactly the customer is requesting. Because it is inside ServiceNow, it is able to connect to all the modules such as knowledge base and finding incident tickets. ServiceNow has a guided setup. Even for my customers for whom I do greenfield implementation projects, I recommend guided setup because it gives you a series of steps. If you miss something, such as if someone is configuring ServiceNow Virtual Agent for the first time, there is a guided setup in ServiceNow that would tell the customer exactly what is needed as a prerequisite. Once the prerequisites are satisfied, the installation happens and you can see it live. It also gives an option of loading demo data just in case someone is installing ServiceNow Virtual Agent on a lower environment and they can afford demo data. The setup and configuration is quite straightforward. For my purchases, I have an account manager with ServiceNow. I send an email or have a conversation over a phone call and tell them my requirements. It is directly related to ServiceNow, and in my experience, I have not come across any third party involvement. I have not come across any integration issues unless someone has told me they are all related to the internal networks and other connections. Nothing is related to ServiceNow.
COO at a renewables & environment company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Jan 26, 2023
I rate ServiceNow Virtual Agent nine out of 10. Once you get it installed, you must keep helping it to mature. Think of it as a child that you're teaching to speak, and you can go a long way with it. If you don't maintain it, your data will become stale, and people will get frustrated. I've used virtual agents from other organizations. You ask a question, and it says something irrelevant. I know it isn't a real person, so I try to rephrase my question with keywords, but I still end up in left field. That can be frustrating. Eventually, I gave up and tried to get a real human being.
Map out your goals, then map the conversation workflows and then work on your community of practice if you have that. It's important that conversation flows are well managed. ServiceNow is a good virtual agent but it's not the best in the market. There are other VAs with more advanced cognitive or AI skills. Nonetheless, it has some good features. From the beginning, I had access to everything under the hood on the Virtual Agent of ServiceNow, and that modularity gave me limitless freedom. The idea of freedom in a box, the modularity in a box, is big at ServiceNow. Understanding the limitations up front, means that it's clear how far you can go. The modularity and transparency of the engine made it easy to understand what was going on.
Make it easy for employees and customers to resolve issues quickly and get what they need, when they need it, with an enterprise conversational experience powered by AI.
ServiceNow does have a list of templates that people use, and ServiceNow does not recommend customization. However, customization opens the world to many possibilities. For example, if a company is called ABC, it has certain processes that might not be the same as the processes other companies follow. There is a lot of customization that happens based on your employees and the nature of your work. In the banking domain, things are different. In a service industry, things are different. In manufacturing and healthcare firms, things are different. ServiceNow is able to support those customizations and cater to their employees. I have some customers in Japan and China and also some people in some part of Europe like France and Spain. Not many people understand English. The natural language processing of translation provides things such as Mandarin, Japanese, French and Spanish. These translators can be integrated with ServiceNow Virtual Agent. This gives an additional advantage. If I am an employee who does not understand English, I do not have to be worried because I have the ability to translate and understand what ServiceNow is saying. In this way, ServiceNow is able to attract more customers. A lot of automation is involved. I currently work in the service-based industry, and there is a concept of timesheet where I need to fill the number of hours I have worked on a daily basis. What I have noticed is that two years ago, if a person used to spend about ten minutes to seek particular information, such as reading a knowledge base article, earlier they had to reach out to someone, share the details, that person would read them, do their analysis and get back. ServiceNow Virtual Agent has reduced the time from ten minutes to a maximum of two to three minutes. That is seven minutes saved. The biggest factor that has changed is the whole turnaround time has come down from nearly five to six to seven minutes, which is a lot in the IT industry when you save time. The platform analytics that ServiceNow has enabled in the last one year is another improvement. Earlier people used to use regular reporting and then switch to performance analytics. Performance analytics is much more data-driven and a little tedious to configure. It is not as straightforward as reporting. With platform analytics, ServiceNow has taken all the abilities of performance analytics and put them in basic reporting. People only have to get versed with the new UI of platform analytics and they can create reports in the same way they used to create them. There is no additional learning involved. Bots in general, whatever bots are available in the market, show ServiceNow Virtual Agent has changed the game in the process where it has understood what exactly the customer is requesting. Because it is inside ServiceNow, it is able to connect to all the modules such as knowledge base and finding incident tickets. ServiceNow has a guided setup. Even for my customers for whom I do greenfield implementation projects, I recommend guided setup because it gives you a series of steps. If you miss something, such as if someone is configuring ServiceNow Virtual Agent for the first time, there is a guided setup in ServiceNow that would tell the customer exactly what is needed as a prerequisite. Once the prerequisites are satisfied, the installation happens and you can see it live. It also gives an option of loading demo data just in case someone is installing ServiceNow Virtual Agent on a lower environment and they can afford demo data. The setup and configuration is quite straightforward. For my purchases, I have an account manager with ServiceNow. I send an email or have a conversation over a phone call and tell them my requirements. It is directly related to ServiceNow, and in my experience, I have not come across any third party involvement. I have not come across any integration issues unless someone has told me they are all related to the internal networks and other connections. Nothing is related to ServiceNow.
I rate ServiceNow Virtual Agent nine out of 10. Once you get it installed, you must keep helping it to mature. Think of it as a child that you're teaching to speak, and you can go a long way with it. If you don't maintain it, your data will become stale, and people will get frustrated. I've used virtual agents from other organizations. You ask a question, and it says something irrelevant. I know it isn't a real person, so I try to rephrase my question with keywords, but I still end up in left field. That can be frustrating. Eventually, I gave up and tried to get a real human being.
Map out your goals, then map the conversation workflows and then work on your community of practice if you have that. It's important that conversation flows are well managed. ServiceNow is a good virtual agent but it's not the best in the market. There are other VAs with more advanced cognitive or AI skills. Nonetheless, it has some good features. From the beginning, I had access to everything under the hood on the Virtual Agent of ServiceNow, and that modularity gave me limitless freedom. The idea of freedom in a box, the modularity in a box, is big at ServiceNow. Understanding the limitations up front, means that it's clear how far you can go. The modularity and transparency of the engine made it easy to understand what was going on.