How can I make opening request item forms from a Virtual Agent chat as user-friendly as possible?

[sbh]

We're setting up Virtual Agent and Live Agent chat. If the Virtual Agent can't find any useful suggestions and no live agent is available, we're going to give the user a link to open a - pretty generic - request item form (in the portal) which is associated with the interaction record. The test version works but it starts a new chat conversation when the user clicks on the link to open the form. My original question was going to be how I could script closing the chat window or find some other way to prevent a new conversation from opening when a user clicked on that open-form link.

Then I realized that, if a user clicks on a link to open a form from the chat's search results, the form opens in the back end, not in the portal, which opens a whole new can of worms;

We did a lot of work the first year we used ServiceNow trying to keep end users from having to use the back end. They found it a really bad experience and responded positively when they only had to use the portal to use ServiceNow. (Most of the changes involved linking to the portal view of request items and incidents from notifications.)

So now I've got some more problems to solve if I want to have request forms open from chat in a way that's consistent and user-friendly.

• My original question: Is there a way to prevent a new chat from opening when someone opens a request item or incident form from a link in chat?
• Is there a way to have all chat links that open task forms open the forms in the portal and not in the back end?
• Is there a way to reconfigure the 'Order Now' section of request items in the back end so that users just see the Submit button they see in the portal?
• Is there a way to redirect users back to the portal after they submit forms in the back end? (That part may not be that bad.) Is there a way to do that without opening a new chat conversation?
• Is there a better way to approach this?

As always, thanks in advance for any help!

[Gokul Janardana]

Hello,

Please share the details about your current configuration with some screenshots if possible. 

[sbh]

I'll have to attach the other screenshots in a separate reply - there's a limit of 6 attachments.

The screenshots I attached here show two different examples of what happened when I clicked on a link for a catalog item from search results. One link opened the request form in the back end; the other opened the request form in the portal and a new chat conversation opened, which is the same thing that happens with my custom actions that open request forms in the portal.  

I haven't (yet) pinned down which topics present the catalog item links in each conversation, much less the nodes within those topics, but I've got red boxes drawn around the possible topics in the interaction screenshots. All of the possible topics are OOB except for one. I'll attach the screenshot of the custom topic and of the default chat experience in the next reply but - the only things I changed in that custom topic were to add two nodes that add links to a completely different catalog item. So even if the custom topic is involved, it's not coming from a custom node. This means that at least one OOB node opens the request form in the portal and another OOB node opens it in the back end).

So even if I'm able to bypass the issue by having the user submit the request from inside the chat, I still need to handle the two different ways that OOB search results in different topics open request forms. One isn't user-friendly and the other opens a new chat conversation. So I still have the same problem to solve.

The attached screenshots show

• the catalog item link presented within the chat
• where the request form opened up when I clicked on the link - back end, or portal with new chat opened up
• the interaction record's transcript and logs

for each of the two cases.

[sbh]

Here are the Default Chat Experience and custom topic screenshots. The nodes I added to the custom topic are boxed in red but both open requests that aren't for headphones or toner. Otherwise, the custom topic is the same as the OOB Search Fallback Topic.

[sbh]

Thank you, @Gokul Janardanan ! What configuration details would help?

I'm getting some screenshots now and I see that sometimes request links from chat search open in the portal, in a new tab, and they open a new chat conversation. So I'll get screenshots of the topics and interactions involved.