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 · ‎07-05-2019

Hi Brendan,

I was able to get this script to work - thank you for sharing - but I think I may have had the wrong expectations and it could be due to the fact that I have Virtual Agent enabled...

In response to my comment contrasting Agent Chat from Connect Support, Scott mentioned that "you can imitate the behavior of having a chat link go directly to a Queue by passing a context parameter with a Queue Name... and then use that context parameter in the AWA Queue routing condition" and so my expectation is that it would take me right to the specified queue without any other actions, but that's not the case; if I use this context parameter + routing condition, the customer needs to:

Click the menu button (an unintuitive three dots in the corner)
Click "Contact Support" (even though they may have already thought they were contacting support by using the chat)
Click "Contact Live Agent"
(from here, this is where I was able to successfully test that routing condition)

So now using Agent Chat instead of Connect Support is considerably more complex for sysadmins AND customers. If we weren't using Virtual Agent, this could be a different story and the auto-redirect may/should work as expected, but that's out of the question because we have invested in VA.

Am I missing something??

scottrhodes · ‎07-11-2019

Hi Chris,

Need to understand your desired behavior, you say you have Virtual Agent. Do you plan to engage Virtual Agent topics before going to a Live Agent? Or do you just want to go to a Live Agent not using VA?

Cheers,
Scott

Chris D · ‎07-11-2019

Going back to my original questions for context, we had started rolling out Connect Support and since learning more about Agent Chat, put a further roll out on hold since a) we are not ready to roll out the "preferred" Agent Chat and b) Agent Chat lacks some features and simplicity of Connect Support.

So we are used to - and would like to continue to have the option to - have customers be able to click a hyperlink and instantly be taken to the respective chat queue.

That said, to answer your questions: we'd like both. We do have use cases where we'd like Virtual Agent engaged first before a Live Agent (i.e. our company-wide help desk), but we also have other use cases where we'd like customers to be able to skip the Virtual Agent and go right to a Live Agent (i.e. service-specific support groups that generally operate a part-time chat queue). In the case of the latter, the support group could share/publish their chat queue URL in a location they own, such as a Catalog Item Description, and their customers could get direct access to them.

scottrhodes · ‎09-26-2019

If you installed VA, you can bypass VA and go straight to a Live Agent by passing the following value in your URL "sysparm_live_agent_only=true"

scottrhodes · ‎06-21-2019

Hi Chris,

We recently posted an example of using Context for routing in the Madrid documentation.

Tutorial: Route interactions by context

Cheers,
Scott