Starting with Pega Customer Service 8.2, the chat functionality has undergone fundamental changes to improve the text-based interaction experience and to centralize the chat configuration and administration. For example, Pega Customer Service 8.2 and later chat functionality offers self-service capabilities where all new customer interactions pass through a web chatbot as the first resolution path. Customers can then choose to escalate the chat to a CSR. If you are upgrading to Pega Customer Service 8.2 from an earlier version, you must reconfigure the chat functionality to work in the new framework.

Before you begin

• Ensure that all the relevant product hotfixes are installed for the Pega Customer Service version you are using.
• Run the Pre-Upgrade Checker to evaluate the health of your application, identify the list of overridden critical rules, and fix the overwritten critical rules before you upgrade. For more information about the Pre-Upgrade Checker, see Pega Customer Service and Pega Sales Automation 8.3 Upgrade Guide on the Pega Customer Service Product Page.

1. In the navigation panel of App Studio, click Settings > Chat and messaging.
2. On the Configuration tab and go to the Chat section.
3. Select the Type aheadcheck box. By selecting this check box, the CSR can see what the customer is typing in the chat window before the customer sends the chat entry. The CSR can use the extra time to plan an appropriate response or search for the predefined content to send as a response.
4. Complete the server configuration as follows:
   1. In the Chat server hostname field, enter the hostname of the existing chat server.
   2. In the Configuration protocol list, select Http or Https.
   3. To configure the chat server with your application, ensure that the Port field is auto-populated with the value 443.
   4. In the Server configuration keyfield, enter the configuration key of the selected chat server.
5. To ensure that the connection is established between the Pega Customer Service application and the provisioned chat server, click Verify.
   On successful verification, Key Verified message appears below the Server configuration key field.

Migrating the legacy chat queues

After configuring the chat server, you must migrate the legacy chat queues to the new omni-channel queues. Pega Customer Service uses omni-channel queues to handle conversations from chat and Facebook Messenger. To migrate the legacy chat queues to the omni-channel queues, Pega Customer Service provides a utility that completes the migration by auto-populating the new properties of the omni-channel queues with default values. Administrators can modify the default values after migrating the legacy chat queues to the omni-channel queues.

1. In the header of Dev Studio, click Configure Dev Studio > Channel Services > Pega Chat > Migrate to Omni- Channel Queues.
2. In the Select Chat Server list, select a chat server whose chat queues you want to migrate.
3. Select the Legacy chat queues to migratecheck box.
4. Click Migrate.
5. Verify the selected queues and click Submit.

For more information about how to modify the default values that are assigned to the new properties in the omni-channel queues, see Configuring chat and messaging queues.

Building the self-service application

To support the Web Chatbot channel, you need to build a self-service application in Pega Customer Service. One single self-service application supports all the self-service channels such as Facebook Messenger bot.

Pega Customer Service includes a CS Self-Service application which consists of several self-service application components. Follow these major steps to build your own customer self-service application by using the CS Self-Service application:

1. Create a ruleset for handling the self-service assets, for example, MyCS-SelfService:01-01-01.
2. Create your customer self-service application by copying the CS Self-Service application:
   1. Replace the existing applications in the Built-on Applications section and update it with your customer service implementation application and Theme-Clarity.
   2. Add the customer self-service ruleset that you created to the top of the application ruleset stack and leave it unlocked.
3. Update the CSSelfServiceAdmin and CSSelfServiceUser access groups to point to your newly created customer self-service application. Update the workpools of these access groups to point to the exact same workpools of Pega Customer Service implementation.

For more information about creating a customer self-service application, see Creating a self-service application (Steps 1-3).

Creating the ChatWithAgent case

Pega Customer Service 8.2 introduces the PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent case type that the web chatbot uses to support chat escalations to CSRs. While running the application wizard on a new installation of Pega Customer Service 8.2 or later, the necessary cases are automatically created in the implementation layer of your application. However, in the case of an upgrade from Pega Customer Service 8.1 or earlier, this does not happen automatically.

To learn how to add the ChatwithAgent case to your customer self-service application, see the Adding Necessary Case Type, Work Pools step in Creating a self-service application.

Configuring and deploying the Web Chatbot

After creating the self-service application, configure a Web Chatbot channel so that users can chat from an external website. As a part of the configuration, you define various chatbot responses to user inputs and actions along with other channel configurations such as interaction timeout. You can apply various styles to the chat window based on your branding requirements before deploying it on your website.

For more information on how to build and deploy the chatbot, see Configuring and deploying the Web Chatbot.

1. Copy the classes in the appropriate class groups to your implementation layer. Set the corresponding directed parent classes of the three classes as follows:

   Class	Parent class
   PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent
   PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-SelectQueue	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-SelectQueue
   PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-PreChatQuestions	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-PreChatQuestions

   The following properties are added to the data transforms that populate the Declare_CAApplicationSettings data page:

   • .ChatAgentClass
   • .SelectQueueClass
   • .PreChatClass

2. Update the three new parameter values to the newly created classes in the relevant data transforms of your Pega Customer Service implementation layer. The values should display in the order that is detailed in the following table.

   Parameter	Value
   .ChatAgentClass	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent
   .SelectQueueClass	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-SelectQueue
   .PreChatClass	PegaCA-Work-ChatWithAgent-PreChatQuestion

3. After the ChatwithAgent case is created, add it to your customer self-service application to include this new case type in the Cases and Data tab.