Annoyed at Connect Support deprecation and Agent Chat
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12-07-2022 04:21 AM
I'm looking for feedback from users who are being forced to move from Connect Support to Agent Chat via Workspace. This might be because they want to use the Next Experience UI or MS Teams integration for Virtual Agent - both of which are incompatible with Connect.
Connect Support will be deprecated in Mar 23, meaning it will no longer be supported. ServiceNow expect you to switch to Agent Chat via Workspaces and new instances haven't had Connect since San Diego.
What do people think about this?
I don't like the idea for several reasons.
The current Connect Support column remains open throughout the platform, allowing agents to monitor it for incoming chats. This does not appear to be possible in Agent Chat. You must remain in a Workspace for the inbox to show. If you open another page, e.g., a List page, the inbox closes.
Currently, adding the Agent Chat inbox to a custom Workspace is quite difficult, requiring you to copy several existing records and linking them together. The ootb SOW Workspace is not editable and Agent Workspace is also being deprecated.
You have to use AWA which appears to only assign a chat to a single person rather than a group, as with Connect Support.
Connect Support shows how long a person has been waiting in the queue.
When you accept a chat via Agent Chat, the default behaviour is to open the accompanying Interaction record alongside it. My agents don't care about this, it just confuses things. In Connect Support, they can choose to create an Incident (or another record type) from the chat box and the interaction gets copied to it.
I genuinely can't see a single positive in the new chat interface. I really wish ServiceNow would keep Connect Support updated so it works in the new UI. I would expect there to be more push-back on this than I'm seeing. Workspaces are clunky and difficult to configure - I don't see why customers need to adopt them to use a feature that has worked reliably without them for many years.
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12-07-2022 06:36 AM - edited 12-07-2022 06:37 AM
I think you have some very valid points here. The lack of 'Follow' functionality in Next Experience is a shocker also.
Regards
Paul
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12-07-2022 09:47 AM
I could not agree more.
ServiceNow keeps shoving this new stuff down our throats. Always a new interface, always needing to rewrite massive swaths of our code, always needing to have YET ANOTHER completely disparate and disjointed UI for doing this or that, always with LESS features-and-functionality rather than more.
Why? Because it's "pReTtIeR"? It's asinine!
Be consistent! Achieve feature parity before forcing people into the interface and dropping support for the features they're already using! Heck, maybe even DOCUMENT your new stuff adequately before shoving it down our throats (maybe - in a crazy topsy-turvy world - you could even document it adequately before RELEASING it? No, no, that's crazy-talk, innit).
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12-07-2022 10:03 AM
The Next Experience was focused on looks over functionality unfortunately. We are not going to be using it for various reasons and your points around chat are some good ones as well.
While I can appreciate wanting something to look better or cleaner, if it doesn't have the exact same functionality as what you are replacing, then it's a waste of time. I feel the same way about Flow Designer as someone who has used Workflow Editor for 6 years now, but that's a whole other conversation.
Please mark this response as correct and/or helpful if it assisted you with your question.
Steven
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12-07-2022 01:25 PM
Yes, the changes from Connect to Agent Chat causes painful transitions, not just in terms of features, as described in this post but also from an integration and API point of view, This Connect to Agent Chat is a move from a simple integration environment to an extremely complex / poorly documented and fairly unstable integration, which requires the Virtual Agent, complex setup and potentially a lot of extra $$$ with the ITSM Pro license as the API access are now become more and more restricted!
Our community is asking for Service Now to reconsider their strategy on Live Chat, to propose simpler, more robust and more open API / Integrations with other chat or agent support platforms.
On this topic, ServiceNow support and developers teams recommended me to post an Idea, which seems to be the best entry point to reach ServiceNow product management ; they check the Ideas.
Here is one on this topic you could vote for:
It has already been signed by a number of very large ServiceNow customers. Let's convince ServiceNow we like their product as long it remains a flexible and open product. This is really what made it so attractive!
