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. 

[Ashley Snyder]

@Wayne Richmond I did want to touch base on some of the Workspace issues, hopefully the information here gets you past any roadblocks you may be encountering for the transition from Connect Support to Agent Chat.

Service Operations Workspace has many configuration options listed in the product documentation. If you're running into issues in certain areas of configuration, the best place to ask questions is in the IT Service Management product hub, so that product managers and experts familiar with Service Operations Workspace can provide assistance. There is also a new Guided Setup with the latest Store version of Service Operations Workspace to assist with configuration.

Agent Workspace is not being deprecated at this time. ServiceNow has a process for deprecations that products must go through, as well as a communication process for deprecated products. We have not submitted any plans for deprecation for Agent Workspace at this time. While we do encourage customers to begin migrating to adopting from Agent Workspace to a configurable workspace, there is no set date for Agent Workspace to be deprecated.

We've introduced workspaces not only to reduce our dependencies on third party libraries such as Jelly with our new UI Framework, but to also provide fulfillers a new end user interface where they can work on multiple records at once, and use new features such as Agent Assist, Analytics Center, Playbooks, etc. We built these new components using web components which are a web standard instead of in Jelly, so that we can ensure the new features we're building are not dependent on third party libraries, and so we can prioritize the enhancements and fixes for our components rather than relying on a third-party company. You can find out more about the Next Experience UI framework on the Developer site.

The flexibility of workspaces also allows our product business units to build interfaces geared towards personas rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that you've seen in Classic Environment forms. An example is the overview page that Service Operations Workspace utilizes to show relevant information to fulfiller/itil users, versus the details page that CSM Configurable Workspaces use. As we get more feedback from our customers on how their personas work, we can better fine tune their experience rather than having to rely on form views and Jelly formatters, controlled by UI Policies, etc.

If you have questions on workspaces or want to know more, visit our Center of Excellence site on the community where we're continually putting out information on workspaces, and our product team is monitoring the forum for questions. We also have live academy sessions each month where we discuss Next Experience topics, and customers can bring questions to our product teams that we will answer during the session or connect with customers afterwards.

[Wayne Richmond]

Thanks Ashely. 

Nothing in SOW appears to be configurable thanks to this helpful message on all the pages:

I can see how Workspaces might be affective, and they do look good. However, they are clunky, and not suited for Service Desk agents logging calls every few minutes.

[Lynda1]

I was leaving these comments alone, then saw this:

"However, they are clunky, and not suited for Service Desk agents logging calls every few minutes."

We use the Agent Workspace, our technicians log between 300-500 calls a day in the Agent Workspace and accept on average 100 chats a day.

Switching to the Workspace was a challenge because the Technicians had to change how they work, once they adapted, they are good with using this Workspace.

If you are using Predictive Intelligence, the Agent Workspace makes linking to Incidents, Change Requests and Knowledge Base Articles so much easier. (A click of a button)

[Wayne Richmond]

Thanks Lynda, I'm glad it's working well for others. It's a shame to hear it was a challenge to make that switch though.

[Lynda1]

The challenge was "we moved the cheese" on the team. Once they learned where everything was moved to, they were ok. We had them use the Test environment for a month to play and learn the changes before we implemented this in Production.

I am noticing all the new features that ServiceNow implements is benefited in the Workspaces automatically. Rip off the band aide 😊