Ask the Expert - Pega Customer Service with Amit Patel
Join Amit Patel (@Amit_Patel) in this Ask the Expert session (11th - 15th Nov) on Pega Customer Service with special focus on Pega Chat and Chatbots!
Meet Amit: Amit is a Director of development for the Pega Customer Service product. He has 20 years of software development experience with 9 of those being Pega. He is very much hands-on in the Customer Service product development and has been driving the Chatbot and messaging features for the last 4 releases.
Message from Amit: Hi all. I’ve been pretty involved in answering ad hoc questions on the Pega Community related to Chat and Chatbots. I’m glad to join this Ask the Expert forum and answer any further questions that you may have. I have a direct influence on the product roadmap, so I’m also open to suggestions for future enhancements. My goal is to make these feature easy to implement and powerful to use for our clients and your customers.
Ask the Expert Rules
- Follow the Pega Support Community's Community Rules of Engagement
- This is not a Live Chat - Amit will reply to your questions over the course of the week (11th - 15th Nov)
- Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
- Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
- Have fun!
The Hanover Insurance Group
US
Hi,
we have pega cs 7.2.1 version on prem . we are connecting to a pegachat 8.2 ( on cloud) . the business wants to increase the chat interaction idle time from the default 30 sec to 60 secs . there is no option in chat server config in pega cs. i opened an sr but the support team directed me to this community . please, help .
also, is there a way to hide the chat icon on the client side when there are no csr . the same thing with chat icon . its pretty big and using up realestate on the client page. any suggestions are appreciated.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hello, I'm not sure which chat interaction idle time you are referring to. Can you please clarify? In 8.2 version of CS, there are some new idle timeouts that have been introduced have configuration items associated with it. But, in 7.2, I don't recall such a timeout.
Showing the Chat icon based on agent availability is not really possible. The reason is that there may be multiple queues that a customer may want to join and some of them may have CSRs and other may not.
Finally, the Chat launcher is displayed using a div on the screen. You can override any of the CSS that controls it in your local web page. The class #chatContainer .orbImage controls the size of the chat icon. The class #chatContainer .chatOrb controls the size and color of the bubble around it. You can alter the look and feel of the launcher through local CSS changes.
The Hanover Insurance Group
US
Thankyou Amit for your quick response . i was referring to the pop-up when a new chat interaction comes to a csr . if the csr doesn't accept the chat within 30 secs, there is no way to accept it . our business is asking if we can increase that time . in know in pega cs 8.x there are some options to configure , however we are 7.2.1 , wondering if we can override any setting .
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Ok, that makes sense. Hotfix 55513 will add the configuration option in the Chat Server settings to let you set that value. Also, another suggestion made by the Chat team is that you can completely hide the default Chat icon and replace it with your own. On click, you would simply call the javascript API "fireflyChatAPI.startChatSession()"
Rulesware
CA
Is there any FireFlyChat API documentation available?
there is a post from 2018, that has a reference link:
https://s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/chat-api-doc/index.html#pega-chat-api-reference
but the link seems dead or inaccessible.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hi Sari, the Firefly Chap API is deprecated. It's only applicable if the Customer Service application you are using is older than 8.2. After 8.2, the APIs are invoked directly by the Chatbot and are not publicly documented. If you are using an older version of CS, we can answer your questions about the APIs. I don't think any public documentation is available.
Rulesware
CA
Hello,
Really appreciate the Ask the Expert sessions Pega does.
I was looking for some technical documentations of the changes in Pega 8, since the Pega Chat now is integrated and on the cloud.
- Are there any examples or documentations about the end to end cycle of a request coming from a Self Service Advisor "Chat with Agent" request to the point it pops up on the CSR side to accept chat ?
- For client with Pega Chat, is there a Dev chat server & a Prod chat server ? or do both the Pega Dev environment and Prod environment share one chat server for a client ?
- Another way to look at this, is there any technical documentation about the system topology between Pega Chat and Pega Customer Service Servers ?
-
Diving more technical, Pega Chat relies on
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cyFetchRoutingDestination
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cyReRouteConversationRequest
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cyUpdateConversationSchema
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Are there more Queue processors involved? and Is there any documentation about what each of those Queue Processor's job is, and how they interact together ?
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hello, so many great questions. In terms of technical documentation, there's not much in terms of the internal communication between the chat server and the Pega CS application. The messaging involved there is not meant to be updated or overridden by an implementation, so there's not externally published documentation. If you have any specific questions, I'm happy to answer them. The only APIs that are externally available are for launching Proactive Chat on a page, and those are available https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/pega-customer-service/apis-support-proactive-chat.
Generally speaking, when a customer signs up for Chat, a Production level chat server is provisioned. If a UAT or another level is required, it can be provisioned as needed. Generally speaking, our customers would rely on which websites have the Chat enabled to separate the traffic, instead of using different servers.
The Queue processors that you have described are all used by the routing engine. Their use is also not designed to be updated, so there's no external documentation available for their purposes. However, there's a document that describes the routing logic at a high level. https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/pega-customer-service/omni-channel-queue-based-routing-mechanism
Hello, so many great questions. In terms of technical documentation, there's not much in terms of the internal communication between the chat server and the Pega CS application. The messaging involved there is not meant to be updated or overridden by an implementation, so there's not externally published documentation. If you have any specific questions, I'm happy to answer them. The only APIs that are externally available are for launching Proactive Chat on a page, and those are available https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/pega-customer-service/apis-support-proactive-chat.
Generally speaking, when a customer signs up for Chat, a Production level chat server is provisioned. If a UAT or another level is required, it can be provisioned as needed. Generally speaking, our customers would rely on which websites have the Chat enabled to separate the traffic, instead of using different servers.
The Queue processors that you have described are all used by the routing engine. Their use is also not designed to be updated, so there's no external documentation available for their purposes. However, there's a document that describes the routing logic at a high level. https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/pega-customer-service/omni-channel-queue-based-routing-mechanism
Amit
Coforge
US
Hello Amit,
I am trying to implement WebBot and Chat bot in our application. When I tried to open the index.html for the chat or the mashp up code for html file for bot ,I am getting operator unauthenicated exception. I checked the logs enabling debugger for pyChatAuthentication activity. The activity creates the webchatbot operator id from model and maps the access group properly. Immediately after executing the activity I am getting exception Exception occured:
com.pega.pegarules.pub.context.PRSecurityException: Security violation attempting to access requestor . In logs requestor and ruleset is empty for this exception. Template operator have necessary roles and access. What could be the issue ?
Version - 8.3 and environment is http.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hi Aravind, I'm not sure what the exact issue here is. Things to check would be : Template operator has the access group whose default application is the Self-Service application where the channel is defined. Make sure the operator is not Disabled in the Security tab. Make sure that the Web.xml where your Pega application is deployed has the PRChat servlet mapping. It should OOTB, but sometimes it gets altered. Those are the items to start with.
Amit
UBS
GB
Hi Amit,
We are planning for upgrade Pega from current v7.1.9 to v8.3 along with other infrastructure component upgrades. One of the major upgrade we are doing as part of this program - moving from WebSphere Proprietary information hidden to Tomcat 9.x.
I have couple of questions which i would hope you will get answers
Q1#: We are using JMS services (Connect JMS and Service JMS) rules using JMS listeners.
As we are using WebSphere with ear deployment, will there be any issues if we move to Tomcat 9.x
Q2#: We are storing our case data into separate schema (Work schema) rather than data schema. As we progress through case, data gets committed into multiple schemas at the same time (distributed transaction or two phase commits). Will it continue to work if we start using Tomcat 9.x?
Thanks,
Vijay
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
Hi Vijay,
Since the topic for this session is Pega Customer Service, we encourage you to update your existing post for these queries instead of pursuing the discussion on this thread: Pega Platform + Infrastructure combination
Thank you.