The Now Virtual Agent allows you to perform routine ServiceNow tasks directly in Teams, so you can work more efficiently within the enterprise using chat. With Now Virtual Agent you can:

  • Execute routine ServiceNow actions via chat
  • Exchange data seamlessly with your existing ServiceNow apps
  • Find answers to frequently asked questions
  • Resolve common IT requests and HR tasks across your enterprise ServiceNow cloud services

Note: Virtual Agent services are available in ServiceNow London release onward. Users must have an active ServiceNow account with Virtual Agent capabilities to use this application in Teams. ServiceNow administrator must setup the integration with teams for using the Now Virtual Agent services across your enterprise.

As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, the combined power of business agility and collaboration has never been more critical. Enabling collaboration within workflows in Microsoft Teams, agents can tackle complex issues together and swarm resources to ensure that incidents are taken care of as quickly as possible.

These breakthrough capabilities, available now, include:

  • Chat-to-Call: Agents can invite an employee to a Teams call directly from a live chat to quickly understand and resolve an issue. Chat-to-Call also enables video calling and screen sharing, allowing agents to significantly reduce time to resolution by quickly diagnosing an incident. In more complex situations, agents can join employees via video to provide a more human touch
  • Major Incident Management, including meeting extensions: Agents can rapidly collaborate in a group setting to address organization-wide incidents through a structured process. With meeting extensions, key information can be shared from the Now Platform® directly into a Teams meeting to give agents a shared understanding of the incident at hand and enable more rapid responses

Note the following important issues before installing:

  • The Virtual Agent integration with Microsoft Teams creates a one-to-one association between the ServiceNow instance that you are installing from and the Microsoft Teams tenant in which the integration runs. Use a separate Microsoft Teams tenant for each instance that you plan to install the integration in
  • The Virtual Agent integration is only supported for users who have a user record in ServiceNow
  • ServiceNow for Teams app embeds the Virtual Agent capabilities. This procedure will connect the Virtual Agent capabilities on the ServiceNow for Teams app we installed

Roles required:

  • virtual_agent_admin and external_app_install_admin or admin
  • Administrator for third-party applications

Add-in capabilities

When this add-in is used, it

  • Can send data over the Internet
  • This add-in can access personal information on the active message, such as phone numbers, postal addresses, or URLs. The add-in may send this data to a third-party service. Other items in your mailbox can’t be read or modified

Pros:

  • MS Teams might be the major channel of communication in your organization, so it makes sense to use MS teams as front-end of your chatbot
  • Business users might not be aware of Virtual Agent functionality in ServiceNow, so we can pin our Virtual Agent on left hand side of MS Teams as it becomes more visible to them
  • The UI seemed user-friendly to me for people who do not use ServiceNow more often
  • It can be used from MS Teams mobile app very easily

Connect Virtual Agent in Microsoft Teams with ServiceNow: