Idle Chat Reminder & Auto‑Close Timing in Now Assist Virtual Agent (VA) – Explanation

PrasadShelar · 3 weeks ago

Hey Community,

Idle Chat Reminder & Auto‑Close Timing – Explanation

Use Case -

Inactive chats should automatically time out so that conversations that have been abandoned are properly closed and do not remain open or active in the system.

Hint -

com.glide.cs.idle_chat_reminder_timeout - Idle reminder
com.glide.cs.idle_chat_cancel_timeout - Auto‑close

Even after configuring:

com.glide.cs.idle_chat_reminder_timeout - Idle reminder at 3 minutes (180 seconds)
com.glide.cs.idle_chat_cancel_timeout - Auto‑close at 6 minutes (360 seconds)

the reminder or chat closure can still be delayed by up to 2 minutes.

Why this happens

ServiceNow evaluates idle chats using the scheduled job - Idle Chat Timer Task, which runs every 2 minutes (120 seconds) by default.
Idle actions are triggered only when this job runs, not exactly when the timeout threshold is reached.

Example Timeline

0:00 – Last message sent by user/agent
2:00 – Job runs → idle = 120s → no action
3:00 – Reminder threshold reached, but job has not run
4:00 – Job runs → idle ≈ 240s → reminder is sent

Not sure if the same logic applies to auto‑closure, which may occur slightly later than the configured 6 minutes.

Note :
Idle reminders and auto‑closures occur at the next scheduled job run, so delays up to the job interval are expected.

Reducing the Idle Chat Timer Task frequency is required if more precise timing is needed.

Thank you!