Chat Server Administration

Overview

The chat solution provides chat channels for customers to communicate with live and automated (bot) agents in a call center. It embraces a set of different components, each providing a certain piece of functionality.

From a business perspective, we view a chat communication as:

1. A customer starts a chat from a company web page, mobile application, or through a supported messenger
2. From the call center, the chat can first be answered by an automated agent and then be routed to a live agent
3. Upon the chat completion, the chat transcript is saved in the historical records and the call center reporting reflects the processing of this chat conversation

The diagram below depicts the chat solution essential components and the most significant communication channels between the applications.

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From a technical standpoint, this works in the following way with the Genesys Chat Solution:

1. A customer uses either Genesys Chat Widget (or a custom web chat application), or mobile application which communicates with Genesys Mobile Engagement (GMS) publicly faced REST (or CometD) API.
2. GMS communicates with a backbone Chat Server. When new chat session is being requested, Chat Server
   • Communicates with Universal Contact Server (UCS) to create a record (with a few known attributes) and identifies the customer with the contact attributes provided.
   • Creates the interaction in Interaction Server which is sent to the workflow and executed by Universal Routing Server (URS) and/or Orchestration Server (ORS) applications. The workflow permits system messages to the chat session to invite automated bots, to route the interaction to the best available agent or the last handling agent.
3. If bots are involved, Bot Gateway Server (BGS) connects the bot to the chat session upon the request from the workflow. As soon as the bot has finished, the workflow continues.
4. The workflow invites an agent (represented by the agent desktop application) and Genesys provides both thin (WWE) and thick (WDE) agent desktops. Note: Customers can implement their own custom desktop by using Platform SDK (PSDK) or Web Services and Applications (GWS) API to Genesys components.
5. If the agent accepts the invitation for chat, the agent desktop connects the agent to the chat session.
6. If the chat session is running in Asynchronous (async) mode, the agent can put the conversation on hold by disconnecting from the chat session and placing the interaction into the agent workbin. Later, the agent can resume the conversation or, alternatively, the workflow can be configured to alert an agent or to start routing the interaction upon a reply from the customer.
7. Upon the completion of the chat, Chat Server mandates that UCS saves the final version of the chat session transcript in the UCS record and marks the interaction in the workflow as offline. The workflow sends the offline interaction for post-processing (for example, sends an email to the customer with the chat session transcript) and then stops the interaction.
8. For historical reporting, during chat session closure, Chat Server provides a set of internal metrics which describes the chat session behavior and participants. This information is absorbed by Genesys Info Mart (GIM) (the core historical component) and later is used in historical reports provided by Genesys CX Insights (GCXI).
9. Other messaging channels can be added to the chat solution by deploying Digital Messaging Server (DMS) based components, such as Short Message Service (SMS), Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, or Twitter. All messaging channels communicate through Chat Server, utilizing the same functionality in workflow, bots, and reporting. For the agent desktop in Workspace Desktop Edition (WDE), special plugins are used which implement channel-specific features such as structured messages, and others.

For chat channels, Chat Server provides the following features:

• All chat conversations can be conducted in multiple languages (including the use of emojis) without any special configuration. For the correct processing of chat session interaction attributes, Unicode Transformation Format-8 (UTF-8) mode can be enabled for all components.
• The cleanup of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can be enabled in configuration settings. For example, forcing Chat Server to replace digits in credit card numbers with the asterisk symbol, preventing it from appearing in the chat session transcript.
• Inactivity control can be enabled to detect a conversation's inactivity, send an alert to the chat participants, and to close the chat session automatically if the activity is not resumed.
• For web chat, the full high-availability support is provided by utilizing either UCS or Cassandra as the storage for the intermediate content of the chat conversation.
• Every chat session can be silently monitored by a supervisor. The agent can invite another agent into the same chat session either in conference mode (when the second agent is visible to a customer), or in consult/coaching mode (when the second agent is invisible to a customer).
• Most of the channels (including web chat) support file transfer, where both a customer and the agent can send files to each other. Some channels support rich media elements or so-called structured messages (for example, list picker in Apple Business Chat, or a carousel for web chat).

Additional functionality provided by other components:

• Agent Desktop provides:
  • Agent access to the full contact history (all previous chat and non-chat interactions with a customer)
  • Standard responses with pre-populated content. Such responses are especially important when the agent needs to send structured messages
• A URS/ORS workflow allows the interaction to be routed to the "last called agent" (in other words, the agent who handled the previous interaction from this customer), which is utilized in async chat when a customer's message awakens the interaction in the workbin.

The following topics provide information for Chat Server administrators:

Feature	Description
Sizing Guide, Setting Load Limits, and Health Monitoring	Describes how much load a solution can hold, how to restrict the load and how to monitor the health per Chat Server instance.
Deploying a Chat Solution	Describes how to deploy a Chat Solution.
Deploying High-Availability Chat Server	Describes how to deploy multiple Chat Server instances in high availability mode.
Multilingual Processing	Describes how to configure a solution to process/work with multiple languages.
Masking Sensitive Data	Describes how to mask out sensitive data in chat session messages/transcripts and in Chat Server logs.
Inactivity Monitoring	Describes how to configure chat session closure upon participants’ inactivity.
Matching Contact Attributes	Describes the approach to contact identification and creation.
Sending ESP requests to Chat Session from Workflow	Describes how to send messages, notices, and other requests from workflow (like URS/ORS strategies) to an active chat session.
Chat Server Reporting Data	Describes Chat Server reporting statistics attached to the user data of the interaction in Interaction Server.
File Transfer in Chat Session	Describes how to deploy and configure file transfer between chat session participants.
Chat Server API selected notes and topics	Describes selected cases and topics on how to use Chat Server API for implementation of custom desktop and widget.
How to Classify Chat Transcripts	Describes how to classify chat transcripts post-interaction.
Asynchronous Chat	Describes how to work with Asynchronous (async) chat within Genesys Chat Solution, Workspace Desktop Edition (WDE), and Widgets.
Chat Business Process Sample	Provides a sample workflow which demonstrates how to process chat interactions for both regular and asynchronous chat with different channels including web chat, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp.