VA Teams integration - do not use the word "help"

[Lynda1]

We just discovered this today and thought an article will help others not experience the pain.

We have integrated Virtual Agent with MS Teams,  there were random times the users were not able to get to Live Chat and discovered the reason today.

We had Get help now - the word "help" was displaying the Help Card instead of following the flow of the Topic. The Topic flow for Get help now is going to Live Chat.

I went through and removed the word "help" from every single choice that was in the Topics. Now the users are able to get to live chat as long as they do not say the word "help".

If anyone has Virtual Agent integrated with MS Teams and has an issue with live chat, check to see if you have the word "help" and remove that word. Live chat from Teams mysteriously works with "help" removed.

[Victor Chen]

Hi Lynda - this sounds like unintentional behavior. Did you happen to log a Case for this issue, or more info on your "Get Help" topic? Is that referring to an included topic or one you created? We can then investigate further. 

[Lynda1]

We did not log a case, it is something I have been watching for and when a user was sharing her screen and selected an option within the flow that has the word "help" the help card displayed and the flow of the chat stopped. When I saw that, I realized it was the word "help" and the help card is what I was seeing, (in the transcripts html content does not appear).

Once I saw that behavior, I removed the word help from all the topics. Here is an example of what we use to have.

The user selects Get help now, the flow goes to Live Chat,  However! if the user is using the Teams integrated VA, selecting Get help now displays the help card.

We just went live with the VA and Teams integration, I had to fix this as soon as I saw what it was doing since we use the concept of "First impression".

Now the choice says this instead

FYI - I do not have a "Get help" Topic  🙂

[Kenn Denn]

Our team recently discovered this as well. There's a pre-set list of commands (sys_cs_contextual_action.list) that trigger specific actions in Microsoft Teams; one of those commands is "help". We initially went through and updated the values for some of our Virtual Agent items because they were triggering the help card in Teams, but updating the term in that list will also fix the issue.

[Lynda1]

The Help in that list makes sense. What was happening, we would have "Get Help Now" as a choice value within a Topic and when users selected  that choice, the Help card displayed and stopped the Topic flow. So, I went through and removed the word "Help" from the choice values.

[Kenn Denn]

Just so I'm understanding, was "Get Help Now" both the value and the label for the choice?

We had gone through and changed the values of our options to "help1" or "helpme" etc. and that worked even though we hadn't yet changed "help" in the list of Teams commands. When the standalone choice value was "help" though it would trigger the card in Teams.

[Lynda1]

Get Help Now was the label (what users saw) and Chat was the value in the choice options. We changed it to Chat with Service Desk as the label and left Chat as the value.

[rajeev17]

Hi Victor ,

I am also facing same issue i have integrated with team and when we use teams for live agent it is ending the topic .

Attached the image

Thanks and regards,

Rajeev

[Lynda1]

Rajeev,

we had that issue when  we implemented the teams integration and it only happened when the live chat came from Teams.

We worked with ServiceNow and added this to a script before going to the Transfer to agent topic block:

vaVars.LiveAgent_application = 'itsm'

the itsm is the name of one of the queues the chats route to.  Not sure if this will help your situation so figured may as well share.