Connecting a customer to an agent

Pega Chat broadens the omnichannel customer engagement experience of Pega Customer Service by providing customer service over the web. With Pega Chat, a customer service representative (CSR) interacts with customers from your website by sending and receiving chat messages. Pega Customer Service guides CSRs through chat interactions, making responses consistent.

This is the high-level sequence of events that happen when a customer connects to a CSR through chat:

1. The customer wants to chat and sends a request to the chat server.
2. The chat server places in the request in a queue.
3. An available CSR receives the chat request from the queue.

When a customer first logs in to a site, the Pega chat icon has to be enabled for the web page the customer is on. This is done with a javascript snippet. The javascript defines configuration information like the Pega chat server URL and the chat queues for the website.

When a customer clicks the chat icon, a chat session starts. In this chat session, an HTTP request is made to connect to the chat server. The connection is upgraded to a web sockets connection to conduct the chat session.

Once the customer web page has established a connection with the chat server, the chat server places the request in a chat queue. The value of fireflyChatAPI.skipQueueSelection property from the javascript determines the queuing behavior.

If the value is set to false, the chat window presents a list of queues to the customer. The customer can select an appropriate queue to use. The chat server places the chat request in the selected queue.

If the value is set to true, the chat window uses URL mapping. In the Designer Studio, URL mapping is done by mapping the web page URL pattern and associating it with a chat queue. The customer web page URL pattern is used to decide the queue.

Every chat queue has a set of skills associated with it, just as CSRs have a set of skills associated with them. For CSRs, skills can be found as part of their operator record in the Designer Studio. Each skill has a rating associated for the CSR. When a CSR logs into Pega Chat they are asked to select which queues to log into. A CSR will see every queue they are eligible for based on their skills. As chat requests get placed into a queue, they are dispatched to CSRs based on their skill rating.