Welcome to the Agent Chat Quick Start Guide
If you are brand new to Agent Chat then this is the place for you! This guide will help you to get up to speed on activating and building your Agent Chat and Advanced Work Assignment routing and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time.
Let’s get started…
Agent Chat:
Agent Chat enables agents to interact directly with requesters using the chat functionality.
It enables customers to ask questions and receive information by
chatting with a live agent. Agents can create incident or case records, or transfer chats to another agent or queue.
Watch the video below to learn more about using Agent Chat in Workspace
The Agent Chat window is embedded within the Agent Workspace.
What is Agent Workspace?
A workspace is a suite of tools that provides agents, case managers, help desk professionals, and managers with tools to help answer customer questions and resolve customer problems. ServiceNow® provides many workspaces, each targeted at a specific user. ServiceNow® provides several different workspaces for tier 1 agents specializing in fields such as HR, IT, CSM, etc. that assist them to solve internal or external customer issues.
ServiceNow® Next Experience UI unifies your instance apps and reduces clicks to access the items you need to get working and Next Experience Workspace UI improves agent efficiency for a better customer experience which enables users to view results for their Unified Navigation searches in workspace applications as well as in global search.
Workspaces include all the tools that agents need to find, research, and resolve issues. Watch the video below to learn more about using Workspaces.
Different Workspaces:
ServiceNow® provides different workspaces for different issue types. Please check our product documentation for the latest workspaces updates.
Below are a few ServiceNow® provided workspaces:
- CSM Agent Workspace
- ITSM Agent Workspace
- Agent Workspace for Request Management
- HR Agent Workspace
- Hardware Asset Workspace
- Legacy Agent Workspace for CMDB
If you have questions on workspaces or want to know more, visit our Center of Excellence site on the community where we're continually putting out information on workspaces, and our product team is monitoring the forum for questions. Determine if you are using the right Workspace. If you are not sure, you should check with your ServiceNow® account executive to find the right workspace for your business need.
Advanced Work Assignment Overview:
Use Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) to automatically assign Work Items to your agents, based on their availability, capacity, and optionally, skills.
- Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) pushes work to qualified agents using work item queues, routing conditions, and assignment criteria that you define. Agents see their assignments in their Agent Workspace inbox.
Customers can use different channels to request service, for example, chats, cases, or incidents. (Requests from customers create task or interaction records that store information about these objects, called work items.)
AWA automatically routes work items to queues that focus on certain types of support, using criteria (such as priority or customer status) that you provide. Queues can be defined based on need or type, for example, VIP chat or critical cases.
AWA also identifies the agent groups responsible for work in the queue by defining assignment rules that you set and using agent availability, capacity, and skills to assign work to the most qualified agent for a Live chat.
Advanced Work Assignment workflow
To learn more find below helpful Resources in communities:
Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Implementation Guide
Advanced Work Assignment FAQ’s
AWA Implementation Guide YouTube Link
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Before Getting Started . . . |
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Before you get started with the setup and configuration of your first Agent Chat and AWA implementation, you must be prepared with the following things: |
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Entitlement |
To be able to use Agent Chat and AWA in a production environment, you must have a subscription that entitles you to it. You must have a Standard subscription for basic features and a Pro (e.g., ITSM Pro, HR Pro, CSM Pro.) for advanced features. If you are not sure, you should check with your ServiceNow® account executive. Within the ServiceNow® instance, the Subscription Management module will not allow you to activate a plugin for which you are not entitled. |
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Service Portal |
To provide the user with an interactive experience, you must have the Chat Interface installed and configured in the Service Portal. For more information on setting up the Service Portal and adding the chat widget, visit the ServiceNow® documentation. |
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Required Roles |
To follow the installation steps, you will need the appropriate security role for the ServiceNow® instance. To install the Agent Workspace, Agent Chat, and AWA plugins, you will need the admin role. To configure the Agent Chat and AWA components, you will need the admin or awa_admin and workspace_admin role. |
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Release Strategy |
As you start working with the Agent Chat and AWA environments, you will want to consider how you will officially deploy the solution to a production instance. It is highly recommended that you first do all your work in a sub-product environment to ensure that everything operates as expected. Then you should go through your company's normal release processes to make the configuration changes in production. |
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Steps to quick success for Agent Chat with AWA |
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Step 1: Activating Agent Chat and Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Determine and install the plugins you need to start working with Agent Chat and AWA. When activating the Agent Chat plugin, AWA and Workspace will be activated along with its default.
Step 2: Configuring Agent Chat Find more details in the product documentation here
Step 2: Implementation of Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) The steps to configure AWA are below: · Configure service channels. · Configure Chat setup to route and assign chat interactions. · Define work item queues. · Set up work assignment rules. · Create or modify agent groups
Operations dashboard to enable managers to monitor work items so that can better support customer needs.
Agent Affinity is an Advanced Work Assignment feature that lets you assign work items by an agent's work history, related task, or account team affinity.
The Advanced Work Assignment monitoring page shows the Total agent summary, Agent status, Work Items, Response time, and queues. Find more in Link
Step 3: Set up Agent chat Implementation of Agent chat replaces Connect chat and Connect support completely · Update your Live Feed profile to display agent names and avatars in the chat client by admin and agents. · Configure Agent Chat in Service Portal · Agent Chat settings (E.g: Agent status, estimated wait time, emojis, Auto Pilot, Quick actions, Agent wisher, response templates, Dynamic translation) · Set the system messages for agent status and transfer. · Manage Quick Action controls. · Advanced Agent features activation Find detailed information for the Agent Chat setup Here and Here
Step 4: Agent assist Build Agent assist recommendations, Similar resolved tickets, and similar KB articles. This facilitates Level 1 agents to quickly see the resolution and helpful articles in one click using agent assist options Here.
Step 5: Analytics and Reporting Solutions for Advanced Work Assignment Analytics and Reporting Solutions contain preconfigured dashboards. These dashboards contain actionable data visualizations that help you improve your business processes and practices. Here |
Connect Support Planned for Deprecation for March 2023
ServiceNow® has officially announced the deprecation timeline for Connect Support. These plugins will no longer activate or support, as of two upcoming Now Platform® releases.
The best alternate option is to Move from Connect Support to Advanced Work Assignment and Agent Chat which provides more advanced features to improve the efficiency of your agents and end user experience.
