Annoyed at Connect Support deprecation and Agent Chat

[Wayne Richmond]

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. 

[Chris D]

This is a throwback to my 3.5 year old post where I first griped about this: Connect Support vs. Live Agent Chat (Advanced Work Assignment) + Is Connect Support going to be depr...

It wasn't too long after that I bit the bullet and switched us over - though in our case at that point in time, our Connect Support usage was effectively a pilot which only had maybe a few small queues and we didn't move our primary Service Desk chat queue into ServiceNow until after we transitioned to Agent Chat.

Agent Chat has definitely improved regularly - and certainly is better than Connect Support in many ways (though that's easy when the former is deprecated 🙂 but as you note, there are still some key unreconcilable differences and I too am astounded that still nothing has been done to finish bridging the gap and give Agent Chat the same features that its predecessor had.

[Samyuktha Reddy]

Thank you for your post, it gave us a chance to understand your concerns and an opportunity to reply with some helpful information and resources.

Each Customer business need is different so are the use cases, please reach out to your ServiceNow Account Executives to get help from our experts. For any new/enhancement ideas please post them in our idea portal. The more votes your idea gets from other users would help our Product Management team to prioritize them.

Please find the answers below:

1) 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. 

Ans: As the Agent Chat is integrated into Agent Workspace, Chat Inbox will be visible only in Agent Workspace for agents. AWA admin can also set up an audio alert to notify agents of incoming chats. Please post your idea portal, we can consider this in our future roadmap when it gets more votes from other users.

Agent workspace provides many new capabilities in Agent Chat compared to Connect Support to improve your agent's efficiency with Supervisor features, such as Agent Whisper, that enable managers to join ongoing public customer chats with agents or send private messages to agents, Agent workspace inbox controls for viewing, accepting, or rejecting incoming chats. With AWA Automatic assignment of chats and work items to agents based on criteria that you define, such as agent availability, capacity, skills, Agent Affinity, and variable work item sizing. Automatic queue overflow handling, Chat timeout reassignment, and active Chat surveys.

2) Currently, adding the Agent Chat inbox to a custom Workspace is quite difficult, requiring copying several existing records and linking them together. My agents also don't like the inbox must always be visible. 

Ans: Please post your idea in our Idea portal. We will work with our team to get better documentation soon. Meanwhile, some of the users have posted some videos on YouTube for these manual steps. Here is a helpful Link.

3) To use AWA which appears to only assign a chat to a single person rather than a group, as with Connect Support. 

Ans: AWA does route the case to the queue/agent group, but it provides additional capabilities to assign it to the right agent who has the availability, capacity, and skill set to complete it faster with better quality. A huge benefit of this is that you do not need to have a manager spend time manually assigning work, causing long wait times for consumers waiting for a response. If there is a business case for manual assignment, then that is still an option - work waiting in queues can be manually assigned to a waiting agent, which removes them from the queue. 

Another way to use this is to configure the assignment rule to assign to a group directly without AWA. 

4) Connect Support shows how long a person has been waiting in the queue. Agent Chat don’t. 

Ans: A manager in his manager's workspace can see how long a queue is waiting before an agent accepts but agents cannot. Managers can also manually assign the chat to an available agent if it is waiting for long in the queue. Whereas agents can only look at the queue and assign themselves with the ‘Assign to me’ feature manually.  

5) When you accept a chat via Agent Chat, the default behavior is to open the accompanying Interaction record alongside it.

Ans: Please post your idea in our idea portal. Find here to learn more about Agent Chat interaction capabilities.

6) The lack of 'Follow' functionality in Next Experience is a shocker also.  

Ans: Follow will be available in Next Experience in the coming future release. Ask your Account Executives for the roadmap plan.

Thank You.

[Wayne Richmond]

Hello Samyuktha. Thank you for your reply. 

I'm a little disappointed that many of your responses suggest that I should post my ideas on the idea portal. These are not new ideas! This is existing functionality removed from a feature we (and many others) use daily. The alternative functionality is not like-for-like.

It's a shame that you have to link to a customer's YouTube video for instructions on how to enable key functionality into your system.

With regards to AWA and group assignment, I am referring to a chat interaction, i.e., when a user initiates live chat from the portal, the alert appears in every group member's inbox to accept, as it currently works in Connect Support.

[OS4]

Hi Samyuktha,

You mentioned "

3) To use AWA which appears to only assign a chat to a single person rather than a group, as with Connect Support. 

Ans: "Another way to use this is to configure the assignment rule to assign to a group directly without AWA."

Could you explain how this can be achieved?

[Samyuktha Reddy]

Hi OS4,

We need more details on your requirements, as the above-mentioned response is generic. Can you please raise a support ticket so that our support team will provide you with the details based on your requirements?