What's new in Tokyo for Agent Chat, Routing, and Sidebar 🗼🌸

[Eliza]

With a new release comes a bundle of new and exciting features for Agent Chat, Routing, and Sidebar! Some features are included within the family release, with others having to be manually downloaded from the ServiceNow Store.

 
Please do submit any questions or comments on this article - we love your feedback!

Sidebar

Product Overview

Sidebar is a new collaboration framework available only with the Next Experience. It enables workspace users to have discussions with a specified group of people (other agents, SMEs, etc.) to quickly resolve task-based records or interactions such as Cases, Incidents, etc. Discussions allow agents to triage records, exchange information and knowledge for resolution with faster and higher quality outcomes. Sidebar is only available in workspace experiences. For information on supported workspaces see the Sidebar product documentation.

Some key features of Sidebar are:

• Agents to discuss and chat within the context of the case or interaction, share information including relevant attachments, knowledge base or files for faster resolution with higher quality outcomes.
• Agents can Search to quickly find items across discussions
• Record Based discussions
• Posting messages to Activity Stream
• Favoriting discussions
• Configurable Quick Actions
• Search through discussions
• Emojis
  
  

What are the prerequisites for Sidebar?

1. Next Experience must be enabled
2. Sidebar shares front-end dependencies with Agent Chat and Virtual Agent web client, which are found in the family release. Sidebar is released as a Store application as of Tokyo and is not part of the family upgrade. 
   

Sidebar Resources

• For more information on Sidebar and to install and configure Sidebar check the product documentation and the Sidebar FAQs. 
•  The Next Experience team also have hosted a Next Experience Academy session highlighting Sidebar. Si
  

Advanced Work Assignment

Auto-Assignment

• Provides the ability to directly assign work based on an agent’s availability, capacity, and skills with no options for agents to accept or reject the incoming work.
• Configuration is defined at the Assignment Rule level. This means it can be set per assignment group for a work item.
• Assigned work can be displayed in a card or tab format within the workspace.
• Work can still be transferred by the assigned agent to another agent/queue.

 Advanced Work Assignment APIs

• Enables external systems to communicate with Advanced Work Assignment without relying on the workspace inbox module.
• Designed for use in conjunction with a subflow (Flow Designer), providing the ability to connect with 3rd parties (E.g. Microsoft Teams) using spokes.
• Available calls:
  • Get/Set Agent Presence State
  • Get/Set Agent Capacities
  • Get Presence States
  • Accept/Reject Work Item
  • Get Rejection Reasons

Advanced Work Assignment Resources

• For more information on Advanced Work Assignment check the product documentation and the Advanced Work Assignment FAQs.

Agent Chat

 Conversation History Overview

• Allows agents in Agent Chat to view the conversation history for previous conversations within the Agent Chat interface. 

• Historical conversations get displayed only when a live conversation has been opened in the chat window.

Agent Chat Resources

• For more information on Agent Chat check the product documentation and the Agent Chat FAQs.

[Nick Derbawka]

This is a great article, Eliza! Thanks for compiling some resources for us as well. Would love to see you incorporate some of the Now Create content as well.

[Mason Buck1]

Great insight Eliza, this will be helpful as we prepare our client conversations around Tokyo. Keep 'em coming!

[dcb]

Thank you for the article.

I have been reading that Tokyo also introduced the ability to display the customer's Teams presence indicator to help agents know their presence status before they initiate a chat directly from a ticket.   Unfortunately, my administrator did not automatically enable it when we upgraded to Tokyo. Would you be able to share what this looks like inside Agent Workspace for an agent? 

[OS4]

Great article indeed. However, I think SN should be mindful about the customers who heavily adopted some of the products functionalities at a time they were released. For instance, the Agent Chat / AWA is greate and has some smart and cool features. Nevertheless, you are restricted to how chats are assigned to agents i.e capacity, availability and skills. Does it occur to SN, that there maybe some business who heavily use Connect chat way of receiving chats, and changing to Agent Chat / AWA can massively impact their current process, due to Agent chat being restricted to what I mentioned above? Some business can't (due to nature of their process), have agents available at all times, or specifically devoted to monitor the queue. Bottom line: allowing business/agents to pick chats as they see fit (due to nature of the business and ultimately, depening on the workload), would be a great feature to keep, and not completely remove.