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Understanding the Chat Workspace

These topics discuss:

After a customer submits a chat request from a self-service page, the request is routed to an appropriate queue and then an available agent. Usually, a notification about the task appears (depending on the agent setup) on the Unified Agent Desktop (UAD) with some information about the requester. Upon accepting the chat task, the UAD provides:

  • Chat-specific action buttons that the agent can use during the session to perform actions, such as inviting another agent to join the chat, transferring the chat session to another queue for a new agent to take over, and terminating the chat session.

  • Statistics of the chat session, including the customer wait time before the agent accepted the session and the duration of the ongoing session.

  • Agent-to-agent chat, which can be initiated during a chat session with customers for consultation purposes. A consultation chat is different from a conference chat because the dialog between agents is unavailable to the customer.

  • A task navigation list in which the agent can switch among accepted tasks that are currently in working progress.

    See Understanding Multichannel Toolbar Functionality.

The agent chat window, along with the agent popup page, appears after the agent accepts a chat request. The window contains a history box that captures the entire chat conversation as it proceeds and a field in which the agent enters text messages to interact with the participants.

To help agents monitor the activities of multiple chat sessions that they work on concurrently, the agent chat window lists all the active chat requests in the Open Customer Chats field. If any one of the sessions receives a response, a visual cue appears to alert the agent of the activity.

Text Tray

The agent can use the text tray feature to include predefined messages automatically in the Input Text field by pressing quick keys or selecting the messages from the Text Tray link. This link contains a list of static quick keys that are defined in the system. The agent can modify the populated text before sending it.

See Understanding the Text Tray.

Quick Actions

The agent chat window provides a list of actions that the agent can perform for customers while interacting with them. PeopleSoft CRM (Customer Relationship Management) delivers these common actions:

  • Email password to the customer.

    This action resets the customer's user password to password.

    Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM delivers this feature, and customers need to implement their own password retrieving mechanism (for example, asking users personal questions) and send the user ID as part of the payload. This effort requires code change on PeopleTools. Specifically, implementers must change the TriggerQAction function on HTML.RB_AGTCHAT_FUNCTIONS2 to obtain the user IDs using their own implementations.

  • Email chat log to the customer.

  • Push web pages to the customer.

    Web pages can be any external websites or CRM self-service pages.

    Be sure to give your customers security access to the pages that agents can push to them. For example, if you want to push a page with solution information to the customer, you may want to use the customer solution search rather than the helpdesk solution search.

  • Display the initial agent popup page on the right side of the chat workspace.

    This is useful after the agent navigates in different pages for a while and wants to returns to the initial agent popup page.

The agent popup page is a CRM transactional page that is associated with the self-service page from which the chat request originates, and it appears next to the agent chat window when the agent accepts the chat request. The purpose of this page is to assist agents in finding relevant information about the customer or the transaction about which the customer inquires.

The agent can scroll the agent chat window to view the agent popup page while researching information for the customer.

When the agent chooses to end a chat session, all the fields in the agent chat window and buttons on the Multichannel Toolbar are disabled. The agent can categorize the session on the toolbar before closing the chat workspace browser window. The selected category is available for viewing in the interaction created for the chat session, as well as on reports.

CRM delivers a chat-specific category set that you can use to categorize chat sessions.

Agent-to-agent chat sessions are not subject to categorization.