Starting Orlando : Start Migrating to Interaction on Agent Workspace from Service Desk Call

[Apeksha Deval]

ServiceNow is starting EOL process for Service desk call plugin. As you know, it is a 3 release process as shown in below image -

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Similarly the "Service desk call" deprecation planned with Orlando can be deprecated completely in Quebec

Although starting Orlando release, the plugin will not be available on the ServiceNow platform for new activations, plugins previously activated in a production instance will not be retired from instance. Active plugins will remain accessible without change as custom code, which will not be supported by ServiceNow (upgrades to the ServiceNow platform will be unaffected by this change carrying the content of the plugin forward to the new release).

But I would highly recommend our customers to start planning transition to "Interaction" in ITSM Agent Workspace. In Orlando release ServiceNow have heavily invested in enhancing  "Interaction" to have a feature parity with Service Desk Call. This ensures that after transition our customers shall not face feature gap and should continue their work as usual.

Below I have listed down the features and best practices to start using Interaction on ITSM Agent workspace instead of Service Desk Call-

• Create Standard Change request
• Create Problem
• Duration time
• User's Calls
• User's Task

Create Change request:

Now an agent can create Standard Change request from Interaction record as shown in below screenshots.

Clicking on Standard Change would open the Catalog list shown below:

 

Create Problem:

Now an agent can create Problem from Interaction record. This feature is not active OOtB, as a best practice we do-not recommend creating Problem directly from Interaction. 

Below if the property in problem Admin

On activating this option, agent will view create Problem action on ITSM agent workspace -

Duration time

The time agent spent on triaging the Interaction is captured in Duration time field. Starting Orlando this field is shown on Interaction form for ITSM agent workspace.

User's Task

All the task types ( Incident, problem, change etc.) associated with the user ( caller/opened for ) will be listed in this related list.

User's Calls

This interaction list will be shown to customers who is migrating from Service desk:call to Interaction. This related list will display all the records created for this user (caller/opened for) via Service desk:call plugin. 

This will help you to migrate to Interaction without any need of data migration / data loss. This is the smart way to view Call data in interaction.

This will show past 7 days of records OOtB. This can be modified by Admin via Interaction property-

Next Steps 

I hope these enhancements will help you migrating smoothly to Interaction from Service Desk:Call. Now you shall start planning for the migration and feel free to put your migration feedback/challenges in comments for this Article. 

[Carl Fransen1]

Hi,

We are looking to perform integrations for our customer to their CTI software.  Previously this was done using the Service Desk CALL module however this will now need to be the Interaction module.

A number of our customers still use the classic fulfiller interface, not Agent Workspace, which presents an issue as the functionality on the Interaction is no-where near complete on the classic fulfiller interface.

Are there plans to improve the functionality on the fulfiller interface for Interaction to make it 'like for like' with what the Service Desk CALL module provided?

Also - one main feature missed in your list above it 'Create Incident', which is one of the main functions we currently use on the CALL module (and is available on the new Interaction, only on Agent Workspace).

Thanks

Carl.

[Android]

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[Apeksha Deval]

Thank you Carl for comment.

CTI integrations can be achieved with Agent workspace as well. If customers use our OOtB Notify and Twilio combination, they can start using Agent workspace to receive call with nearly no configuration required.

If they use there own telephony provider, OpenFrame is our recommended framework for enabling CTI integration.

We highly recommend our customers to start using Agent workspace for their service desk / tier 1 agents. Starting Orlando ITSM agent workspace is fully capable to support service desk / tier 1 persona use-cases.

Create Incident and Create Request features are already there as part of Interaction on Agent workspace since Madrid release, hence did not mention here explicitly for Orlando release.

[Carl Fransen1]

Hi,

Yes I'd love all our clients to migrate, but that isn't as easy as there are plenty of other things to concentrate on for them.  Understand the integrations and how these can be achieved as well and that the Agent Workspace is almost there in terms of functionality.

While customers are planning migrations some are keen to get their CTI integration moving now.  From the answer I assume there are no plans to enhance the Fulfiller interface at all.

Is there a recommended path from ServiceNow for the fulfiller interface - such as adding UI Actions to perform the record creation or similar?  We don't want to develop something that isn't recommended or will be replaced, however some customers just aren't ready to migrate to Agent Workspace just yet.

[Apeksha Deval]

Hey Carl,

As per the strategy, we are recommending our customers to start migrating their Service-desk agents / tier 0,1 agents to agent workspace. This deprecation is also a part of this strategy.

Therefore, we have taken a cautious discussion to enhance interaction only on workspace and we do not recommend our customers to do custom development on classic UI ( or fulfiller interface) for interactions.

But at last, the decision to do custom development purely depends on how strongly you need these features replicated in classic UI instead of moving to agent workspace.

[Paul Porter]

I'm failing to see how ServiceNow have heavily invested in enhancing "Interaction" to have a feature parity with Service Desk Call. We depend heavily on the operational functions we've built with email integration using Inbound Email Actions. Where is current documentation regarding the so-called feature parity and how to configure that on Workspace?

[Ray Ennis]

Hello,

We are in the midst of the migration and it has been asked of me to migrate the Service Desk Call records to Interactions to both retain reporting continuity and for tracking purposes.

So far I've determined if I export the Calls records I can then import the data into both Interaction and Interaction_related_record... however it appears the import process is changing the 'updated' date to the imported date (which is certainly not desired).
I first exported the data from Calls to excel, massaged the columns and headers to more accurately match the Interaction Table then used Load Data then transform map to actually import the data into Interaction.

My questions are two:

The first is have y'all developed 'this is how we would do it' instructions on migrating data from Calls to Interaction?  (and I just haven't found it)

The second is the method I described the same method y'all would have used?
I have a sneaky feeling I'm missing a few bricks.

Thank you,
.Ray

[Apeksha Deval]

Hello Ray,

Thank you for your comments.

As a best practice and ease for the customers we have provided a related list "User's call" on interaction record which points to call records for that user. So that customer can view call records for that user on interaction form OOtB.

Having done that, we do not expect our customers to do a data migration from one table to another.

Could you please re-evalute your need to do data migration in this case?

[tim2222]

Can you point to documentation for integrating ITSM Workspace to email?

Out of the box Interactions appear to support Chat and Telephony. In the community there are some people creating Interactions or you can have an Incident form in Workspace. I'd expect a "unified comms" solution to provide the same interface over chat, email or telephony but this just doesn't seem to be there for ITSM Workspace.

[Ray Ennis]

Tim,

I think the Customer Service module includes a feature to digest incoming emails and determine what type of ticket the email is and who the ticket should be directed to (I say ticket as we use Interactions in Agent Workspace to start the interaction before determining if the call is either a Request or an Incident... or neither).  I think it uses the AI-feature.

Regarding email, ideally our process goes:  receive email, copy/paste the email to an Interaction, then work the Interaction.

And Interactions are accessed by our IT Service Desk using Agent Workspace.

We yet don't have integration with our phone system (it doesn't support the API-type) but as I understand it API plays a role in the integration between a telephony system and workspace.

[tim2222]

Thanks for your information. We don't have CSM but it does appear to be more aware of Email than ITSM Workspace.

The main issue for me is Interaction has no out of the box email type. Does that mean you shouldn't use them for emails? It's better for our service desks to deal with a single interface for chat, email or telephony - the workspace experience for interactions is quite different to Incident.

I can't find any documentation in ServiceNow for what the philosophy/design is for email + workspace.

[rekschandu]

Hi Ray,

We are in the process of migrating calls to interactions.

Can you please help with the process you followed.

Did you use the Agent Workspace and the possible ways to achieve this.

Thanks!!

Rekha

[Ray Ennis]

Rekha,

I grabbed my notes and posted them in its' own article.

You should be able to find them here:

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_article&sys_id=f26c500adb47ac10fb4ae15b8a9619cc

Thank you for your interest,
.Ray

[rekschandu]

Hi Apeksha,

I added "User's call"  to the Related List in the Interaction form but I do not see this appear on the related lists.

Do I have to update/modify any properties.

Please help.

TIA

Rekha

[AlexS_]

@Apeksha Deval or anyone else that may know the answer.  Ssince it is no longer best practice to use Agent Workspace since it is not configurable is there any updated best practices to move to a configurable workspace like Operators Workspace?