AWA - Agent Chat config questions

[Robert Crawley]

Hello, I hope I'm in the right spot. I'm currently configuring our AWA and Live Agent set up and had a couple questions I was hoping to get some assistance with. I have gone through docs, and now U courses. 

We're using this for our service desk at the moment, who manages email, chat, and phones; however, the phone queue is managed externally from NOW and we do not plan to integrate that onto the Platform for some time.

Our setup:

Service Channel with queues for vip and non-vip

Schedule and Business hours for the queues since none of the OOB options fit with our needs

I've configured the Virtual Agent to simply move straight to agent transfer as we're not working with VA content yet.

I've also set up a custom VA flow to handle the greeting as we wanted to gather initial info about the reason for the chat before passing to the Agent. This will then update the interaction with the necessary info.

Agent capacity is set to 1

Since our agents have two separate queues they would need to manage their presence in, I was hoping I could set up an option where they could pick up a chat pending in the queue. However, research indicates that manually assigning work items tends to break the system? I did try setting up a BR and UI actions, and it worked to a degree, I kept falling down a rabbit hole of what needed to be set and it felt like it was breaking more than it was fixing so killed the idea. Would the best configuration be setting the agent timeout to leave them in an active state, and when they are available accept the incoming chat? Of course, would need a really long max wait time set up. We were also considering adding in a prompt for alternate support options after X amount of wait time has passed. 

For scheduling and business hours; is this largely irrelevant for Agent Chat? I was hoping that the system would queue up chats during business hours regardless of agent presence, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Chats are only queued while agents are in an available state but busy with other work and at their capacity. Would it require a significant number of changes to have this behave as I described, or is that too much for AWA? I understand why it flips to the "no agents available" message when there are, literally, no agents available. Chats could sit indefinitely if no agents ever came on, and that would be a terrible user experience. 

[Dexter Chan]

1. Manually assigning work items is possible but would be contrary to what the assignment rules, capacity, and skills mgmt are for. There is a scheduled job "AWA WorkItem TimeOut Job" that clears inactive work items and also the average wait time is calculated based on the average of the last 20 interaction wait times. These are things to consider when solutioning your requirement. 
2. Correct, agent chat is only available if an agent manually sets their presence state = available. There is no oob feature to ensure agents are always available but you can create a BR to achieve this if desired. The plugin with Workforce Optimization can be used to view Agent schedules to see when they are on shift but still requires the manual setting of the presence state. 

[Robert Crawley]

Thank you Dexter. I appreciate the follow up.