The Rome release is just around the corner, with general availability later this month. With that in mind, I have taken a look at a couple of the more interesting new capabilities that are set to make a real difference to many organizations. 

Virtual Agent

The virtual agent is one of the most powerful tools in the armory of a business building a world-class customer or employee experience. Therefore, in the Rome release, ServiceNow has lavished attention on it, extending its capability further. 

Multi-language topic authoring sees the platform's dynamic language translation extended into the world of Virtual agent topics. Administrators can see all text in a published topic that requires translation in the designer itself and can update them immediately.

By using Localization Insights, it is now possible to view on a single dashboard the translated state of all your virtual agent topics and quickly identify any gaps. Missing or incomplete translations can then be requested in bulk and distributed to the appropriate translation teams.

Improving the employee experience with virtual agent even further is the new asynchronous chat functionality. With this, users can pick up and respond to messages sent via Virtual agent or live agent chat sent hours or even days previously.

Beyond enabling a better employee experience, Virtual Agent is also a great way to reduce the workload on your agents. Proving the value can be somewhat challenging however, and this is where deflection tracking comes in. Deflection tracking extends your virtual agent topics, creating reliable metrics against which you can then report.

Conversation auto-pilot too, helps reduce the load on agents by allowing them to trigger virtual agent topics from with a live agent chat, freeing them up for other tasks until informed that the agent topic has been completed.

Employee Center

Second, is the imminent arrival of the new Employee Center. ServiceNow has migrated the Employee Service Center to the ServiceNow Store to enable faster releases of the portal. They have also laid the groundwork for future updates aimed at unifying the different portals which often exist across customer instances today.

The next release of the portal delivered through the Store should not only be an elegant refresh of an already capable portal. It will also enable the creation of a single set of categories, into which are placed both Knowledge articles and requestable items and services, from multiple catalogs and knowledge bases. The result will be a far better experience navigating a portal for users. 

Keep an eye on our blog posts as we continue to spotlight other Rome functionalities and deep dive into the best new platform capabilities for ServiceNow.