Espressive Barista vs ServiceNow Virtual Agent comparison

"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"

"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."

"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."

"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."

"The most valuable feature is its scalability."

"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."

"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."

"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."

"What's best about ServiceNow Virtual Agent is easy implementation. It's a drag-and-drop process where you can set up a chatbot over the UI. I like that ServiceNow Virtual Agent is a low-code solution. For ServiceNow Virtual Agent integration, you'll only need to write short lines of code, so that's easier. As ServiceNow Virtual Agent is under ServiceNow, it's easy to raise an incident, look for a knowledge base article, etc., so this is another pro of the solution."

"Virtual Agent gives us connectivity that can reach out to any middleware."

"The ITSM topics were valuable. They reduced service desk usage and freed agents. They saved 40% to 50% of the time, and the agents were able to do other tasks instead of just replying to customers, replying to their emails, or logging the incidents themselves. That percentage of work was now done directly by end-users who were also happy because they were able to get the query response within seconds instead of waiting in a queue or waiting for an agent to reply."

"For me, it's very valuable that many of the IT solutions that normally service desk agents provide and that take a lot of their time can be done. For example, password reset normally takes a lot of time for service desk agents, and that is something that can be very easily automated so that they can focus on something that adds more value. Password reset or helping with password reset looks simple, and maybe naive, but it takes a significant amount of time for service desk agents. That is something that helps a lot."

"Virtual Agent frees up resources. When properly populated, it's a great asset because it can provide answers 24/7, and you can operate it with reduced staff. You save money. Over time, you can have it learn to address newer questions as you work with it from a support staff standpoint."

"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."

"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."

"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."

"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."

"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."

"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."

"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."

"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."

"Lacks integration with AI search or any enterprise search machine."

"There were occurrences where the machine was not recognizing the topic correctly and not routing the users to the correct topic. It was specifically related to the Spanish language."

"They can help the developers with ready-made structures or JavaScript structures or topics that can be integrated into the basic package. That would help a lot."

"Right now, out of the box, ServiceNow Virtual Agent has no natural language conversion. You can't convert from one language to another. If that functionality were available in ServiceNow Virtual Agent, that would make the solution better and easier for users. For example, if a user is typing in Chinese and the service desk staff is using Hindi, there should be a dynamic conversion of the languages, so there'd be good and accurate communication between the end user and the service desk team. The additional feature I'd like ServiceNow Virtual Agent to have in its next release is language conversion because that's where it's lagging. It's one of the most critical features that clients ask for. I'm in a consulting firm, and I'm helping people implement ServiceNow Virtual Agent. As a consultant, people often ask me this question: "How do you remove the language barrier?""

"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."

"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."

"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."

"The price for the licensing is fair."

"The solution is affordable."

"ServiceNow Virtual Agent was included in my company's basic ServiceNow package, so when you get a ServiceNow license, you can use ServiceNow Virtual Agent for free."

"Based on what I know, when you purchase ServiceNow ITSM, ServiceNow Virtual Agent comes out of the box with it. You don't have to pay extra for the ServiceNow Virtual Agent license. So, there's no extra cost."