Agent Chat in Service Portal without Virtual Agent

[Sean61]

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.

[scottrhodes]

Fixed the links and should work now.

[Chris D]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the information and specifically your mention of Agent Chat being "the preferred chat experience going forward"...

From the sounds of it then, Connect Support will be deprecated (in New York?) and seemingly sunset in the future? 

I won't lie, I do find it a shame because Connect Support is a great chat platform that's insanely quick and easy to stand up, whereas - as supported from your simplified instructions - Agent Chat is overly complex simply for kicking off chats with defined queues. And as-is now, Agent Chat is missing a few notable features from Connect Support as well, including:

• For customers:
• • Starting chats outside of the virtual agent (i.e. with a hyperlink)
  • Starting a chat with a specific queue (i.e. each queue has its own link)
  • Attachments
  • Condensed chat history (per queue)
• For agents:
• • Desktop notifications (also for customers)
  • Voluntary queue assignment (i.e. not auto-assignment - anybody in the queue can pick up a chat)
  • Chat history synced to INC work notes/additional comments
  • Chat history records (i.e. Chat Queue Entry) with a clearly formatted transcript
  • Non-customer visible Work Notes within a chat
  • Automatically share Incident details with customer when created
  • Escalation queue
  • Question (“how can we help you”) message
  • Confirm Problem (“waiting for assignment”) message
  • Not available (outside of schedule) message
• For admins:
• • Easier setup (i.e. no Advanced Work Assignment and Virtual Agent requirements)

Can you provide any insight into Agent Chat absorbing all of these Connect Support features in the near future?

[scottrhodes]

Hi Chris,

Agent Chat will be where we will be making our feature enhancements going forward. Connect Support is still going to be supported as we have not introduced a sunset plan at this time.

Agent Chat has slightly more setup steps because it offers many more features than Connect Support.  It will route all Service Channels (not just chats) to agents based on Availability, Capacity and/or Skills.  Installing the Agent Chat plugin demo data shows how easy it is to setup a simple chat scenario. I also highly recommend reviewing the Webinar i posted in the previous reply to get a complete overview.

Any gaps of functionality between the two solutions are being evaluated and incorporated into Agent Chat when they make sense.  (i.e. Attachments in Chat Client is in an upcoming release).  Also, many of the things you have listed can be done today with Agent Chat.  For example, you can imitate the behavior of having a chat link go directly to a Queue by passing a context parameter with a Queue Name (i.e. https://xxxx.service-now.com/$sn-va-web-client-app.do?sysparm_queue=ProductSupport) and then use that context parameter in the AWA Queue routing condition. 

In addition, Chat Transcript is now stored on the Interaction record for the Chat.  Interaction records starting in London for Workspace are the record for tracking a conversation between a customer and an agent.  In the example of an Incident being created it would have an associated Interaction record for the chat.

Feel free to email me directly if you have specific questions.

[Chris D]

Re: Direct Access to a Queue via URL

I can't get this to work... is it because we're using Virtual Agent...?

Since it doesn't look like we can't use a Simple condition to check the context parameter, I created a chat queue with the following Advanced Routing Condition:

(function executeCondition(/* glide record */ current) { 
// customize condition logic here, return true or false 
if(vaContext.queue=="Test"){ 
 return true;
}
})(current);

(Note I also unsuccessfully tried current.vaContext.queue=="Test")

And then I opened https://xxx.service-now.com/$sn-va-web-client-app.do?sysparm_queue=Test but it just opened up the normal Virtual Agent Chat introduction instead of automatically assigning to the Test (Live Agent) queue. Even if I try to manually transfer to a live agent (via Contact Support), I get "No Chat Agents Currently Available". It works fine if I remove the routing condition or remove the if() statement so I presume it's something to do with that...

What am I doing wrong?

[brendanruchert-]

Hi Chris, I tried out your scripted routing condition, and there appear to be two issues with it:

1. There is a queue variable that is already used in the system which should not be reused, as it may get overwritten or misinterpreted.
   
   
2. The variable vaContext does not exist in the context of the routing condition script. There is another way of accessing the context variables within this script, and a few queues that can be used as the reference if the CSM Workspace and the Consumer Service Portal plugins are installed on the instance (those queues are named "Product Support", "Order Support", and "Billing Support")
   
   Using a script similar to the scripts in those, you should be able to do something like this:
   
   

   (function executeCondition(/* glide record */ current) {  
   // customize condition logic here, return true or false 
   	var contextTable = current.getValue('context_table');
   	var interactionBlobRecord = new GlideRecord(contextTable);
   	interactionBlobRecord.addQuery('sys_id',current.getValue('context_document'));
   	interactionBlobRecord.query();
   
   	if(interactionBlobRecord.next()){
   		var jsonBlob = JSON.parse(interactionBlobRecord.getValue('value'));
   		//gs.info("jsonBlob.liveagent_awa_queue_name: "+jsonBlob.liveagent_awa_queue_name);
   		
   		if(jsonBlob.liveagent_awa_queue_name == 'Test')
   			return true;
   	}
   	return false;	
   	
   })(current);​

   Then try opening the chat using https://xxx.service-now.com/$sn-va-web-client-app.do?sysparm_liveagent_awa_queue_name=Test