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]

Hi @Wayne Richmond correct, the pages we ship are read only, because we need to have something there to prevent customers from deleting them as well as a copy to push new updates to. If customers were to either delete or modify our ootb page templates, you could see how this could cause issues with workspaces not working or missing updates.

Many things in a workspace can be configured via platform modules, such as lists, declarative actions, settings, etc. so you don't need to work directly on the page to configure them. The Service Operations Workspace product documentation is really granular in guiding you to what you can configure without having to create a new page and how to do it.

If you need to modify a page layout itself, you can always create a variant of the page and start with the default layout and configure what you need. You can then either deactivate the OOTB page or set it to a different order so your variant takes prece If you're new to UI Builder and pages/variants/audiences check out the training we have located on our Product Hub to get started.

[Wayne Richmond]

Thanks Ashley. Locking the workspace down isn't consistent with previous SN development. Portals, widgets, flows, workflows, scripting, all SN built but can be copied or duplicated for ease of customisation. I appreciate the links and direction of creating page variants, but it seems like a long winded way of doing something. 

[Paul Curwen]

Thanks for the reply Ashley. I guess what everyone is saying here is that we are seeing ServiceNow releasing things too early with features missing from previous functions. We appreciate you have a massive task at hand and have to start somewhere, but when deprecating functionality please wait until you at least have parity in the new functionality with what we currently have. The lack of Follow in Sidebar example has caused consternation in my user base. I know it is in the pipeline but really should have been there day one. 

[arb]

Have to agree. Obviously over time many enterprises create bespoke customizations in ITSMs that rely heavily on a particular SW suite’s functionality.

Dropping that functionality causes extreme difficulty and cost to the business, in redesign, configuration, and validation to regain that functionality.

This directly impacts IT personnel in providing seamless service to internal and external customers.

[Wayne Richmond]

Hi Ashley, 

I just got this email today:

ITSM Agent Workspace & CMDB Agent Workspace deprecation notification
Review - Take action by March 2024

Our records indicate that a plugin is activated on your instance that we will no longer deploy or support as of an upcoming Now Platform® release.

So, as per you reply (barely eight weeks ago), we all now know when it's going to be depreciated. 

"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."