About Routing of Chat Requests

Chat enables users to chat with, and monitor existing and potential customers browsing the corporate website using the Proactive and Reactive Chat features.

Reactive Chat enables you to respond to visitors who seek assistance when browsing your institution's website. It is particularly useful when visitors want to explore the website independently, while still being able to reach out for assistance when they require it. When the visitor clicks the Chat Now option on the corporate Web page, the visitor’s browser window displays two frames, the browser in the Left pane, and the Transcript pane and the Message area in the Right pane.

Proactive Chat enables you to initiate a chat session with a visitor who is browsing your institution’s website.

Routing of Reactive Chat Requests

When a new Reactive chat request arrives, the Chat Server assigns it to a Queue on the Chat Server from where the request is routed to a User. The routing engine determines the User who is most suited to handle this new request based on Team Routing Rules, User Assignment Rules, and User Reservation Rules.

The chat request that arrives first in the system is serviced first followed by the chat request that arrives next, and so on. You can enable this routing mechanism across chat servers in the cluster by configuring the Require FIFO Routing across chat servers in the cluster Global Option for Chat.

If the routing engine is unable to route a reactive chat request to a User, the next chat request in the Queue is processed. When all the requests in the Queue are processed, the Queue is processed again from the beginning, and all requests that failed to be routed in the previous cycle are processed in the new processing cycle.

If a request cannot be routed to any User, the Queue processing is temporarily paused until the first request is routed or until the time defined for Request expiry time Default Team Option is exceeded.

Example

In a Queue containing 10 chat requests, the routing engine will start by routing the first request R1 to User A. If User A is not found, the routing engine will attempt to route request R1 to other Users. If it fails to route the request to any User after maximum number of retries, the request is removed from the Queue and the visitor is informed that all Users are busy.

To enable effective First In First Out (FIFO) routing of chat requests in a WLBS scenario, you must define a value for the Require FIFO Routing across chat servers in the cluster Global Option.

Example

If a chat request that arrived at 10:00 A.M. on Chat Server 1 needs to be processed before the chat request that arrived at 10:00 A.M. on Chat Server 2, you must enable the RequireFIFORoutingacrosschatserversinthecluster Global Option.