Schedule a Chat back

[Lynda1]

We are not on the Rome version yet but selected that version since we are upgrading soon and there are some neat additions to that version!

When live chat is busy, the wait is over 15 minutes (or a person waiting in the chat queue for 15 minutes), is there a way for VA to give the user the option to schedule a "Chat back"?

I have an idea for those not in the queue, those already in the queue is the challenge. I am sure this is not OOB, if anyone knows of a way to do this, I would love ideas.

[Chris D]

This is a great idea but pretty confident it's not doable with AWA/Agent Chat, not ootb or configurable/customizable.

We've thought about virtual help desk consultations before and if we went ahead with it, I would have tried to use Walk-Up Experience (Scheduling) to do it and I think that could work here for you, albeit a little hacky.

We're on Quebec and I thought there was an ootb Appointment Scheduling VA topic to use, but looking now, it seems like perhaps it was added in Rome so you're in luck: Configure Conversational Appointment Booking | ServiceNow Docs

So basically, an option for you would be to use this booking functionality in your live agent topic (block).

The caveat though is that I'm not sure you can get the wait time before transferring a user to a live agent queue, so the only option may be to do an availability check and then provide the user an option to schedule a chat only if there are no agents available.

And then of course the final caveat: this scheduled chat I'm referring to wouldn't even be in ServiceNow - I'm presuming you use Teams/Slack/etc. and that's what it'd be.

So maybe you were thinking of something like this for people not yet in the queue - for people already in the queue, I have no solution there. My only thought is that is that perhaps you shouldn't be having people wait in a queue for 15+ minutes - which I'm assuming you're achieving through high(er) chat capacities? If your agents can't handle multiple chats at once, you can set the capacity to 1 and that way you don't accept users into the queue unless agents are certain they can pick up the chat briefly. Then you don't need to worry about people waiting in a queue.

And to add an idea there to help improve/not worsen user experience - which we do use in some cases - you could always build in a loop if no agents are available. Something like "Sorry, no agents are currently available but you can try again in a few minutes. What would you like to do? Try again | End Conversation". There wouldn't even be any harm in the user spamming the Try Again button that'd loop back to the availability check, but in Rome, they did add a native Wait topic block which you could throw in if you'd like.

[Lynda1]

The Quebec version fixed the queue issues we were having, first in first out. Our Live chat gets a little busy on Monday and Tuesday, there are times the wait is 30 minutes. It is all internal chat and a small team that supports a large user  base. Agents can accept 3 chats max. We have to have live chat available during chat hours or people complain, they rather wait the 15 minutes.

I have to check out that appointment booking for another effort coming up! Thank you for mentioning that.

For those that have not gone to queue yet and ask for live chat, I am going to see if one of our admins can write a script to check the average wait time, if at 15 minutes, give the user the option to schedule a "Chat back". We will more than likely use MS Teams for these chat backs.

The challenge is those already in queue. I kind of wish there was more functionality behind this "Max Wait Time", run a topic instead of closing the chat.

[Chris D]

The fact that we even need to consider some custom scripting (which I'm sure is doable one way or another - if the system can do it, why can't we?) just to find what the wait time is is a pretty good indicator of AWA/Agent Chat still being a long ways from the robustness that it deserves, but it's getting there.

If wait time is too difficult to find, you could always easily just figure out the number of people in the queue and share that info. Though I say that and realize that's probably how the system calculates wait time by finding the average wait time (maybe in the past few days?) and just multiply that by people waiting.

Doing anything for people in the queue seems near impossible to me. I don't recall if you can customize the transfer message (probably), but a workaround thought is to show a message to the user about the option to schedule a chat. Or you can just spawn that message immediately before transferring, something like "Transferring to a live agent... If you would prefer to schedule a chat instead of waiting, cancel this chat and type in 'schedule chat'."

[Muralidharan BS]

Hi Lynda,

I have a suggestion, how would users connect to live agent?

If they use topic instead of support options, then before connecting to live agent you can do a quick check on the number of the chat already in progress or the wait time for those. You can then route users to message saying "call back later". I cant think of a solution how agents can reach users. 

I have used avg time as constant here as this is my PDI, but you can pull the metrics from awa_queue_metrics_list or awa_queue. If you are using connect then chat_queue.

Topic:

When avg wait time is above 15 min, 

If agents want to do a call back, you can update the interaction record for these record to new state like "call back".  

Thanks