ServiceNow Virtual Agent: Pros, Cons & Alternatives

With the growing number of IT assets, companies need tools to manage ITSM, minimize risks to IT assets, boost employee productivity, and enhance customer experience.

Most companies have fragmented tools for this purpose. However, this approach triggers pain and friction for end-users looking to mitigate their issues.

ServiceNow is a leading choice for enterprise leaders to facilitate digital transformation for ITSM scenarios. It intelligently uses automation to improve operational efficiency and boost end-user satisfaction.

Among many components, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent plays a crucial part in maintaining ITSM compliances by enabling many such core functions for employees, agents, and other stakeholders.

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent offers users much flexibility in managing ITSM tasks. However, it also drives a significant trade-off that impacts user experience.

This article explores how the ServiceNow Virtual Agent transforms ITSM through its benefits. We also take note of its downsides.

Simply put, a ServiceNow Virtual Agent is a conversational chatbot that automatically resolves problems in IT and ESM scenarios.

A ServiceNow Virtual Agent provides an end-to-end conversational experience to users to solve common problems autonomously, allow agents to focus on more creative activities, and enhance employee and customer experience.

ITSM is critical for IT businesses to maintain operations and keep end users productive and efficient. The ServiceNow Virtual Agent helps IT leaders comply with this business ambition by streamlining HR, IT, and customer services workflows.

Let’s learn how Virtual Agent in ServiceNow meets ITSM objectives.

1. Virtual Agent for IT service management

IT services are grappled with common IT issues, such as—

• Password reset/account unlock

• Order a new laptop

• Add a user to the group

• Printer malfunctions

Unfortunately, these common issues often become a big challenge and force employees to engage with service desk agents.

ServiceNow Virtual Agent uses purpose-built NLU to enable employees to populate the right answer to their queries and solve them in real time.

2. Virtual Agent for HR service delivery

Pre-built conversations are useful for employees when handling HR service delivery requests. Virtual Agent can check with knowledge bases and fetch answers to solve HR services, such as,

• Apply for leaves

• Know leave balances

• Get employee contract

• Onboard employees, etc

3. Virtual Agent for customer service management

The same NLU capability helps gain efficiency with customer service use cases. Virtual Agent provides pre-built conversation templates to manage various customer service tasks to solve issues such as,

• Where is my package?

• What’s the update on my order?

• When can I expect my refund?

IT leaders can use a ServiceNow Virtual Agent to automate ESM, including customer services, and bring operational efficiency.

Virtual Agent aims to provide intelligent automation, which improves operational efficiency for employee and customer satisfaction and helps businesses grow. This intelligent chatbot provides amazing capabilities for everyone looking to benefit from service desks or ITSM.

Resolutions of common issues

ServiceNow Virtual Agent allows users and customers to automate common issues and redefine the support experience.

Any time self-service

Employees and users can leverage self-service anytime to handle repetitive tasks and queries without waiting for available agents. Critical problems can see quick resolution rates.

Increased agent efficiency

Virtual Agents can understand the need to route calls automatically to reduce manual efforts and boost agent efficiency while enabling them to deflect tickets in significant numbers.

Enhanced user experience

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent uses NLU to better understand human queries for IT, HR, or customer conversations and intelligently provides personalized experiences with contextual content.

Omnichannel support

ServiceNow integration with conversational platforms such as MS Teams, Slack, or any other channels can give you omnichannel support for your ITSM operations, making it easy to provide self-service or autonomous help at any time of the day.

Conversational analytics

Rich ITSM interaction data is important for making informed decisions. It allows for analyzing virtual agents' performance based on ticket deflection, agent activities, and other factors. Based on the reporting, stakeholders can more easily reduce ITSM challenges and elevate service delivery.

There is no denying that ServiceNow Virtual Agent leads the competition by allowing IT leaders to have outstanding automation for ITSM compliance. Still, its complicated architecture and nature of work may be challenging for internal users and stakeholders. Businesses can face many challenges using ServiceNow Virtual Agent for service desk digital transformation or ITSM efficiency. Here is a list of cons of ServiceNow Virtual Agent.

Limited NLU or natural language understanding

ServiceNow Virtual Agent has pre-built NLU conversation templates to facilitate the most common IT, HR, and customer support interactions. However, gaining a deep understanding of emotional intelligence or empathy for human inputs and providing answers is quite challenging.

If you want to enhance ITSM interactions and provide an all-purpose conversation experience for real-time resolutions, you need additional add-ons to elevate NLU capabilities.

While Virtual Agent is a separate product, it must combine with ServiceNow Studio to boost NLU capabilities and efficiency, improve NLP understanding, and solve problems.

On the other hand, if you want to reduce MTTR to help your agents reduce response time and deliver help, you need a product called Agent Assist, which allows you to use machine learning to help deflect tickets.

Low user adoption

ServiceNow Virtual Agent and NLU can work together as chatbots only for a specific department, not all departments. For example, you need four separate chatbots if you have four different departments or function areas.

It presents a unique challenge for users. With multiple chatbots at the workplace, it is quite overwhelming for users to memorize the perfect use of a specific chatbot. Unable to realize the right chatbot for IT or HR queries, people return to old communication tools to raise calls.

As the ServiceNow Virtual Agent lacks an integrated and unified user experience, user adoption drops, impacting your ROI on ServiceNow.

Dependent on continuous data support

The self-learning capability reduces the need for continuous data ingestion into the model and keeps it updated to changing ITSM scenarios.

The burden with the ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it cannot get smart over time by observing the feedback and action provided for problems.

Retraining and model upgrades require manual effort. You also need a data science team to feed it with new data so it can understand new content and answer unique user questions.

Insufficient custom topics

In the ITSM ecosystem, new queries can arise, and chatbots must be ready to provide real-time contextual answers. This is potential for user frustration as they struggle to find custom answers from ServiceNow Virtual Agent and get frustrated with repeated answers like “try another question or rephrase your question.”

It gives you only a few custom topics, which requires you to create continuous topics and conversation flows to meet user expectations. However, continuously building custom topics and feeding them into the model is hard.

Missing advanced analytics tools

ServiceNow Virtual Agent may have reporting features but lacks significant analytics tools to provide comprehensive insights. One must depend highly on third-party integration to derive rich insights to change the NLU models and enhance their capabilities.

Workativ makes using ServiceNow Virtual Agent meaningful and useful for managing ITSM functions. Here are a few reasons why Workativ integration with ServiceNow is necessary to drive digital transformation for your ITSM.

• Maximize ROI

Your employees get the flexibility to use ServiceNow efficiently using GenAI-powered Workativ AI assistant and help you maximize ROI on ServiceNow.

• Unified Experience

Workativ facilitates enterprise service management outside IT within one integrated chat interface, driving exceptional user adoption.

• Faster Resolutions

Workativ's conversational AI platform uses LLM to process massive datasets, produce real-time responses, boost problem resolutions, and enable compliance with SLA.

• Improved Efficiency

Your agents can continuously interact with tickets created through ServiceNow and focus on what matters most to improve resolution times.

• Increased Satisfaction

Workativ provides a simple and intuitive interface to complement ServiceNow and efficiently addresses service desk issues, increasing NPS and employee satisfaction.

ServiceNow has always been a leading platform for ITSM activities and customer support. However, its intricate architecture requires a deep learning curve to build up conversations in workflows and drive user adoption.

As you leverage Workativ to integrate with ServiceNow, you can effortlessly address its challenges and increase efficiency.

If you want to build a ServiceNow experience for your employee support, Workativ integration is the answer.

Book a call today to schedule a demo for the Workativ virtual assistant for your ServiceNow.