Symptoms

Expired Customer Service web chat interactions contain inactive operators for three (3) days. The persistence of inactive operators in expired web chats poses data risks and causes incorrect data in Organization records for OperatorID, especially for manager tools in the Customer Service Rep dashboard.

Running an agent to purge these inactive operators from the system is a temporary way to remediate this problem, but it requires ongoing attention.

Explanation

 Pegasystems defect

The activity pxCloseExpiredInteractions event persists for three (3) days with inactive operators.

Every time an application user interacts with a customer service agent in a web chat interaction in a case, the system creates a Data-Admin-Operator-ID record. This new operator is cloned from the Template Operator that is defined in the Channel landing page. This new operator becomes the requestor for the remainder of chat session. While it is necessary for these operators to exist for the duration of the case chat to provide the application user with an interaction connection with the customer service agent, they are temporary and do not need to exist after the interaction closes.

Environments

The problem was reported for the following environments:

• Pega Platform™ version 8.5.2
• Pega Customer Service™ version 8.4.4
• Pega Customer Service version 8.7.3

While reported for two versions of Pega Customer Service, this web chat problem occurs in Pega Customer Service versions 8.1 through 8.8.

Solution

To work around this issue until the Pega defect is corrected, perform the following steps:

1. For the Conversational Channel, create an operator like CSSelfServiceUser as the template operator.
2. To grant limited roles and privileges, give this operator, at minimum, the access role PegaRULES:User4, taking into consideration the application settings.
3. Enable the agent Multichannel Close Expired Interactions to run daily, for example, at 11:00 p.m.
   This purges the web chat operators after three (3) days of inactivity.
4. Correct any residual artifacts that result from the inactive operators.
   For example, you might need to remove skills from the template operator so that the web chat operators no longer display in the Customer Service Manager Tools screen.

Watch the Pega Support Center for Pega Platform Resolved Issues for ISSUE-773884, which will describe the defect correction, this text or similar:

The activity pxCloseExpiredInteractions adds a parameter specifying when inactive operators should be removed from the Web Chat interaction. Alternatively, inactive operators are removed when the case’s Web Chat interaction expires.

Alternatively, check the Pega Documentation site for Pega Customer Service Release Notes for Known Issues and Fixed Issues in a future release.

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