Live Agent Chat with Guest

[Ed McGough]

We are currently investigating the capabilities around Live Agent and I like how an authenticated user can chat with an Agent in the WorkSpace, that agent can then create a case or incident and collaborate with the user on the other end of the chat.

Where I am confused and having a difficult time is figuring out how to do this same operation with a user that is NOT authenticated...not sure if we should call this a guest user or an anonymous user.

When I search through SN documentation I see references to both guest and anonymous, so...that's not helping.

My question is, how can I setup (to start with) the CSM portal to allow an unauthenticated user to chat?  Right now I've got the bubble chat widget loading on the page just fine for authenticated users, and it even shows up for unauthenticated users but it does not give the option to "Contact Live Agent".  That is greyed out and only available for authenticated users....so...is this doable?  Is it possible to have an unauthenticated user start a chat?

Thanks!

Ed

[Maik Skoddow]

Hi Ed,

please ask yourself whether you really want hundreds or even thousands of anonymous users (aka bots) to start a chat with a human agent at the same time. This is not a hypothetical question but a very real attack scenario!

On the other hand, it is a fundamental fact that in every ServiceNow table - and thus on all data - there are the columns "created by" and "updated by" and therefore EVERYTHING at ServiceNow is bound to a certain identity.

And "guest" is a certain identity but "anonymous" is not. That's the difference!

[Ed McGough]

Maik,

Excellent points, so let me clarify what I'm after.

When the visitor comes to the portal, if the visitor does not have an account in ServiceNow then I'd the chat to behave similar to other chat widgets on the market, meaning, that the widget would ask the user instantiating the chat to supply name/email and potentially offer CAPTCHA to validate the human aspect of the request. 

Is this something SNOW can do?  Does it currently have the capability to allow an unauthenticated visitor to supply some basic information to start a chat?  If so, then I'd love to see how this works.  ServiceNow's documentation/examples on this topic are a bit thin.

Hope this helps further clarify.

Thanks!

Ed

[Maik Skoddow]

@Mark Roethof : Do you have any idea?

[Ed McGough]

@Maik Skoddow I've almost got this working.  The legacy chat solution offers a record producer to capture the visitor's information along with CAPTCHA and I've been able to somewhat use that to route the chat request to the proper place. Granted, right now that is being instantiated from the SN portal but I should be able to leverage this towards a final solution.  I also now see that chat can take parameters so that should come in handy as well.  I have quite a bit in flight but once I get closer to a final solution i'll chime back in. Any experience/insight on this topic is appreciated.

Thanks!

Ed