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. 

[Steve Vilbig]

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