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!

[Alex Edmiston1 · Accepted solution]

I'd suggest creating a topic that submits the ticket directly in the virtual agent, that way users can stay in the virtual agent the whole time. 

[sbh]

Thanks for replying, @Alex Edmiston ! I was asked to just open the request item and allow the user to add comments or attachments before submitting it. 

There are a couple of OOB topics that submit requests or incidents. I think they run through all the variables and ask the user for answers before the ticket is submitted, so that's definitely worth looking into further.

[sbh]

I'm using a combination of things to solve the three facets of this problem.

• When the virtual agent can't help and there are no live agents available, users can submit the simple request within the chat instead of having the chat open up a link to the form. Many thanks to @Alex Edmiston for this suggestion!
• It turned out that not all search result links open in the back end, only the ones found in the Contextual Search topic block do, or or those found in a topic that uses the Contextual Search topic block (like Fallback Search Topic). (Warning: those were the only topics/topic blocks involved in our chat setup that opened in the back end. Other topics or topic blocks may do the same.) The Contextual Search topic block has a component called 'Display multi-link', and you can see in the details of the Link List Value Expression that the portal value is set to 'any'. You can set the portal in the Fallback Search topic's Contextual Search component's topic block properties. I didn't expect it to be that simple. The attached screenshots will make this clearer.
• I opened a case and it turns out that there's a property I can set that will prevent a new chat conversation from opening when a user clicks a chat link that opens in the portal. I'll share it here when I find out what it is.

[sbh]

The third point of my last reply is incorrect. There is no property I can set to prevent this. Normal OOB behavior is for a new chat conversation to open. It would make more sense to me if the old conversation stayed open and asked if the linked knowledge article or request solved the user's problem than to close the old chat and automatically open a new one, but that's just me. I'll let you know if I hear if anything's changed on this. For now, the only option is to live with the behavior.