Agent Chat wait until max time even when no Agents are available

[Daveedd]

Hello,

We have Agent Chat available to our customers with Virtual Agent currently disabled.  When agents are available the chat will wait for the 5 minute max time limit before giving the no agents available message.

However one quirk I've seen is when no agents are available the no agents available message is presented straight away.  Really we'd like it to wait in the queue for the 5 minute max wait so we have the opportunity to answer the chat and help our customers.

I found this forum chat which says what I describe is the intended behaviour, but no real clues as to what may be going on.  Any help would be appreciated.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/agent-chat-routing-and-sidebar/agent-chat-should-not-display-no...

[Lynda1]

If there are no agents with the "Available" status, the chat queue is closed so the users get that message.

We have our Agents manually go offline when they are scheduled to leave chat support.  We have the max chat per agent set to 3, so if one goes under 3, the AWA routes the next chat to that person.  If that Agent cannot accept the chat, AWA looks for the next available agent and leaves that status to Available.  

I have seen our chat queue go up to 30 people (it was a rough day)

If ALL agents get set to anything other than Available, your chat closes.

[Danish Bhairag2]

Hi @Daveedd ,

In this scenario u can go to the available presence state table & configure the offline state/away state as per your requirement to receive the chat as yes.

In this scenario the chat will route through all the agents who are in away/offline state untill the max time reaches out.

This is to be Frank not a best practice to do so as it might negative customer satisfaction if they need to wait for a long time in order for their chat to get accepted

Please mark my answer helpful & accepted if it answers your query.

Thanks,

Danish

[Daveedd]

Yeah agree that doesn't sound ideal, but "not ideal" seems to sum up using ServiceNow to chat with customers.

Thanks for your help.

[Danish Bhairag2]

Hi @Daveedd ,

Hope you are doing good!

Please mark my answer helpful & accepted & close the thread if your satisfied with the solution provided so that others could benefit from it.

Thanks,

Danish Bhairagdar

[Patrick85]

Did you ever solve this? I need to solve for the same issue of no agent being available, but the chat should wait for an agent before just immediately displaying no agents available.

I noticed that the message displayed when it does this isn't the "Max wait time message" from my awa_queue record, but rather it's the "No agents available message" from the sys_cs_live_agent_setup record. 

I'm debating if I should just try to figure out a way of keeping the System Administrator in an available status. This way users can always wait for a chat, even if the System administrator won't accept it, then just use a timeout period to allow the chat to be re-offered to another agent when one becomes available. 

Update: I submitted a Hi support ticket & they said it wasn't currently possible to configure this. I still wanted to test my idea & it worked.

1. Make a new "System Administrator" group & add only the System Administrator user to it.
2. Add the new group to the Assignment Eligibility [awa_eligibility_pool] record associated with your Queue [awa_queue].
3. Adjust the Group Queue Priorities [awa_group_queue_priority] by increasing the order of the System Administrator group to give it the lowest priority. 
4. Create a before business rule on the Agent Presence [awa_agent_presence] table with a filter to run when the agent is System Administrator. Set the value of the current_presence_state field to available.
5. Note: You probably need to impersonate the System Administrator & set them as available in order to initially create a record on the awa_agent_presence table. 
6. Also Note: It's important that your "Time out" reject reason [awa_reject_reason] has Reassignable=True. 

Hopefully this helps! 😊