Agent Chat in Service Portal without Virtual Agent

Sean61 · ‎04-23-2019

Hi!

I'm trying to set up Agent Chat, so that our users can live chat to our agents from the Service Portal.

I initially set up Connect Support, which was quite straight forward, but we also want to start using the new Agent Workspace and I haven't found a way to pipe Connect Support chats into the Workspace. So it seems that Agent Chat is the way forward!

I don't want to use Virtual Agent yet, I just want this to connect users with currently available agents.

I've followed this document: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-servicenow-platform/page/administer/workspace/task/configu... , installed com.glide.interaction.awa and com.glide.cs, but I'm still having the following issues:

I can't find anything in the docs about how a user is supposed to initiate a chat. Connect Support came with a Service Portal widget (and a link was readily available in the queue config), but I can't find anything relevant for Agent Chat.
I read in another post that this is the chat interface: https://devxxxxx.service-now.com/$sn-va-web-client-app.do however when I open that I get the "No Agents Available" message, even though I'm logged in to the Agent Workspace with a user (who is a member of a group which is set in the Assignment Eligibility list of the AWA queue), and have presence set to Available.

I feel like I'm missing some major part of the equation, but haven't been able to work it out yet.

Sean61 · ‎04-25-2019

I opened a case on HI, and they identified the following:

For Agent Workspace chat, I do need to use $sn-va-web-client-app.do, even though the chat is being passed directly to a live agent, and the Virtual Agent is not getting involved
To allow users to start a chat from the Service Portal, a widget is needed which is included in the plugin "com.glide.va.sp_widgets". This widget adds a small button in the lower right corner of the Service Portal, which opens $sn-va-web-client-app.do in a small iframe.
The reason my chat was not being delivered to an agent in Agent Workspace was that there was a "Work item routing condition" active on the AWA Queue.

After those changes, everything is working as expected.

As a further tip for anyone who finds this, when following this kb on adding the widget to a footer, you can use the following HTML to pass options to the widget (because the <widget> tag doesn't let you specify a widget instance):

<div>
  <widget id='sn-va-sp-widget' options='{"button_color": "#F89A21"}'></widget>
</div>

View solution in original post

Chris D · ‎04-29-2019

I too have found documentation on (Live) Agent Chat similarly unclear and lacking... the way I've come to understand it is that Live Agent Chat does in fact require Virtual Agent (plus Advanced Work Assignment) one way or another. Even if you're not using conversations from the Virtual Agent, you still need to use the Virtual Agent chat window and click the "Contact Support" > "Click here to be transferred to a live agent" buttons. (Note: I do have Virtual Agent enabled so maybe it's one less click without Virtual Agent...?) Otherwise you'd need to setup your conversations to automatically route to a Live Agent. (I haven't quite figured this out but haven't spent much time configuring Virtual Agent.)

Have you ever used Connect Support? I've been using it for a few months now and am a big fan, especially because of its simplicity, but, even though you'd think Agent Chat was very similar, it's completely different in almost every way short of the active chat itself. There's definitely some benefits to Agent Chat, but for a number of reasons, I find Connect Support notably superior, even though it's older.

If you went the simple route with Agent Chat and just directed people to press that button to open the chat window and start a live chat, it's seems like it's only going to go to one chat queue, which makes sense to a degree if you have a single help desk, but isn't helpful if you have various support areas that could manage their own chat queues.

For Connect Support, it's just a simple hyperlink to kickoff a chat with a particular queue (and of course you can be transferred afterwards) but it seems like Agent Chat is always going to start with one queue and if you need to talk to any other queue, they'd need to transfer you manually. Even if you had Advanced Work Assignment (and/or Virtual Agent?) setup to route to a specific chat queue, you still need to start with the Virtual Agent chat and type in the correct thing or otherwise meet the right condition.

Does this sound accurate/consistent with your findings? I'm most tempted to just give up on Agent Chat and focus completely on Connect Support, but I know that Agent Chat will be useful for our help desk, even though most other teams/chat queues would probably be better off using Connect Support. But then you lose the ability to transfer chats between them because they're two different Chat Queue tables... ugh...

Sean61 · ‎04-29-2019

Yeah that sounds accurate.

In terms of end user experience without any of the Virtual Agent plugins enabled, the VA chat window immediately sends the user to the Live Agent chat queue. So it's easy enough for them, although I find the floating button is less discoverable than the Connect Support chat widgets.

I set up a Connect Support test implementation a week or so ago, and was quite impressed with the functionality. The Service Portal integration is very nice, and I agree that the direct URL to each chat queue is super handy. The only reason I switched over to Agent Chat is for the integration with the new Agent Workspace that comes with Madrid.

Apart from the lack of Agent Workspace integration, I think Connect Support is superior to non-VA Agent Chat in every way. Some issues I've found with Agent Chat so far:

No way for users to attach files to a chat. Connect Support allows users to attach anything, including pasting screenshots directly from their clipboard, which is a super useful feature.
No real Service Portal integration, other than the floating button, which has to be sort of hacked in. Connect Support integrates natively into the header bar, which is really nice.
The agent workflow of researching KB articles and linking them in to the chat is nowhere near as nice. In Connect Support you can open the knowledge base in a side-by-side pane, and drag articles into the chat. When a user clicks on the article, it opens the article in the SP context. Agent Chat seems to support this by pasting in the ID of a KB or other record, but it's not as easy and I haven't actually found any documentation on how it works (I just found this functionality by accident)
No direct notification to users of incident creation. Agents can paste in the incident details once created, but Connect Support's method of changing the identification of the chat to directly reference the incident is much nicer.
Some weird empty message glitches in the chat window:

In saying that, I've found a couple of features of Agent Chat that I do like:

Agent Workspace integration. I think Agent Workspace will be the future (for our organisation at least), so integrating with it is pretty important.
Advanced Work Assignment has the potential to be quite powerful. I like the round-robin style of chat assignment, rather than waiting for agents to pull a chat from the queue

In an ideal world, Connect Support would have been integrated into Agent Workspace (maybe it is already, and I just haven't found out how to do it), and then Agent Chat wouldn't even be a consideration.

scottrhodes · ‎06-11-2019

We are currently working on improving documentation to make it more clear on all the steps necessary to use Agent Chat in Workspace. Agent Chat in Workspace is the preferred chat experience going forward as this is where we will be investing in our future roadmap. In the meantime let me help summarized the process on setting this up.

Steps:

Activate required plugins
1. com.glide.interaction.awa
2. com.glide.cs
Agent Chat requires Advanced Work Assignment to be installed and setup
- This includes setting up Channels, Queues, Assignment Rules, Agent Presence
Configure the Virtual Agent Web Client (or MS Teams/Slack adapters)
1. Agent Chat requires the use of the VA Chat Client (not Connect Support Client), you do not need to have a VA license to use the VA Chat Client
2. - com.glide.cs automatically installs Virtual Agent Web Client (com.glide.cs.sn-va-web-client-app)
  - If you have VA plugin (com.glide.cs.chatbot) enabled with active topics you can be transferred to a Live Agent by either the topic initiating the transfer or utilizing the Contact Live Agent in the menu.
  - If you do not have the VA plugin enabled, the user will be directed to a live agent automatically.
Configure Chat Setup to utilize the Agent Workspace fulfiller backend
- By default the backend is set to Connect Support.
Workspace Agents must have the 'awa_agent' role to see the Agent Inbox in Workspace

Notes:

All Live Chats (including being transferred by a VA Topic) generate an Interaction record to capture the details of a chat.
AWA supports more than one queue by using Queue Routing Conditions determine what queue a chat should go to.
- Routing Conditions can utilize the Chat Interaction details (i.e. Account Name, Contacts Language, etc.) or VA Context Variables to determine what Queue a chat should go to.
A recent AWA Webinar has been recorded that would have more details that you might find helpful.

scottrhodes · ‎06-11-2019

We are currently working on improving documentation to make it more clear on all the steps necessary to use Agent Chat in Workspace. Agent Chat in Workspace is the preferred chat experience going forward as this is where we will be investing in our future roadmap. In the meantime let me help summarized the process on setting this up.

Steps:

Activate required plugins
1. com.glide.interaction.awa
2. com.glide.cs
Agent Chat requires Advanced Work Assignment to be installed and setup
- This includes setting up Channels, Queues, Assignment Rules, Agent Presence
Configure the Virtual Agent Web Client (or MS Teams/Slack adapters)
1. Agent Chat requires the use of the VA Chat Client (not Connect Support Client), you do not need to have a VA license to use the VA Chat Client
2. - com.glide.cs automatically installs Virtual Agent Web Client (com.glide.cs.sn-va-web-client-app)
  - If you have VA plugin (com.glide.cs.chatbot) enabled with active topics you can be transferred to a Live Agent by either the topic initiating the transfer or utilizing the Contact Live Agent in the menu.
  - If you do not have the VA plugin enabled, the user will be directed to a live agent automatically.
Configure Chat Setup to utilize the Agent Workspace fulfiller backend
- By default the backend is set to Connect Support.
Workspace Agents must have the 'awa_agent' role to see the Agent Inbox in Workspace

Notes:

All Live Chats (including being transferred by a VA Topic) generate an Interaction record to capture the details of a chat.
AWA supports more than one queue by using Queue Routing Conditions determine what queue a chat should go to.
- Routing Conditions can utilize the Chat Interaction details (i.e. Account Name, Contacts Language, etc.) or VA Context Variables to determine what Queue a chat should go to.
A recent AWA Webinar has been recorded that would have more details that you might find helpful.

Sean61 · ‎06-11-2019

Hi Scott, thanks for the reply.

FYI your links are pointing to a service that doesn't seem to be accessible to me.