Virtual Agent Chat integration with 3rd party chat software

[Community Alums]

We are looking at how to go about integrating a 3rd party chat system within our existing ServiceNow Virtual Agent setup.

The end user will continue to use ServiceNow Virtual Agent through Employee Center to initiate the chat. At the point they request to speak to a live agent then the chat will be handed over to the 3rd party chat software where the agents on this system will interact with the end user. Any chat messages from the 3rd party chat will be fed back to the ServiceNow chat and any messages from the end user will be sent to the 3rd party chat. The 3rd party chat agents will also have access to ServiceNow, so the thought is that as part of the VA flow the URL to the ServiceNow Interaction record will be sent as part of the chat conversation, so that the 3rd party Agent can open it and update the relevant record. The end user would also see this, but this is fine as they normally get this link at the end of the chat anyway.

I don't have any experience of doing something like this before so have been searching to try and work out what the approach to this should be.

I have found this doc about 'Virtual Agent Bot Interconnect': Using Virtual Agent Bot Interconnect in your configuration (servicenow.com). It seems like ServiceNow VA can be set as the primary and then the 3rd party chat would be secondary which seems like it might be what we need.

I have also found this post on the community where Drew was trying to do a similar thing: Question: Custom Bots, Bot Interconnect, Virtual A... - ServiceNow Community. This seems to indicate that alongside the 'Virtual Agent Bot Interconnect', you would use the Virtual Agent API and Flow Designer.

As with everything, this is urgent/high priority and needs to be delivered yesterday, hence I don't have much time to fully explore and digest in the way I would like to! I am ideally looking for a steer from others who have experience of this that what I have said above is a sensible way to progress and I am not going down the wrong path.

Any input is appreciated!

[srajput]

Hi Steve, were you able to find anything on this?

[Community Alums]

Hi, no we ended up not proceeding with a full integration as described above.

Instead we did a smaller one that still had the chats being performed in ServiceNow, but had the initial assignment of which analyst would handle the chat was done via REST messages.