Chatting with service desk agents in Service Portal

In the Self Service Center in Service Portal, you can open a chat to resolve an issue. Depending on how your administrator configured chat services, you can chat with a Watson Virtual Assistant, a live agent, or both.

About this task

When you open a chat, by default the chat is flagged as a new issue, but you can choose to discuss an existing issue. If you are using IBM® Control Desk live chat, Service Portal displays your open tickets, and you can specify which one you want to discuss or specify a new ticket. Specifying an existing issue gives the agent quick access to information related to the existing ticket and facilitates resolution. If you are using the Watson Virtual Assistant, a new issue is specified by default..

When you chat about a new issue, a new ticket is created.

Complete the following steps to chat with an agent.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the Self Service Center.
  2. To initiate a chat, click Live Chat live chat.
  3. Choose to create a new ticket, request a chat with a Watson Virtual Assistant, or request a chat with a live agent.
  4. To close the chat window, click End Chat.

Live chat in a clustered environments

Live chat for end users using Service Portal is currently supported for single chat queue (default: CHAT_Q). Service Desk agents must login using IBM Control Desk interface to give resolution to the live chats raised by the end users. For live chats to work in a clustered environments, administrator must ensure that the cluster configuration is correctly done as per the instructions given in Enabling live chats in a clustered environment and Configuring single-queue live chat: Service Desk manager.

Following are the supported deployments:
  • Single Service Portal instance and single IBM Control Desk instance
    • Running on same server
    • Running on separate server
  • Single Service Portal instance and multiple IBM Control Desk instances
    • Service Portal co-located with one of the IBM Control Desk servers
    • Running on separate server
  • Multiple Service Portal instances and single IBM Control Desk instance
    • IBM Control Desk instance co-located with one of the Service Portal instances
    • Running on separate servers
  • Multiple Service Portal instances and multiple IBM Control Desk instances
    • Running on separate servers
    • Service Portal instance may, or, may not be co-located on the IBM Control Desk instance server
Note:
  1. To ensure seamless chats through Service Portal, different end users must use Service Portal live chat from their independent and different machines. Multiple sessions corresponding to different end users are not recommended from the same machine.
  2. It is recommended to ensure session affinity for end-user browser sessions accessing clustered Service Portal by using an appropriate sticky session technique. For example, ROUTEID cookie can be set to maintain session-stickiness while using an apache load balancer for distributing requests amongst clustered Service Portal instances.

Result

If you are using the Watson Virtual Assistant, a text record of your chat is then attached to the ticket under the Attachments tab.