I have recently been working with Live Assist from CaféX. Live Assist is an omni-channel addition to Dynamics 365 that gives us web chat capability and more. Within Unified Service Desk (USD) we can automate many of its functions. In this post I describe one! How to send messages from actions in USD.

First of all, when would this be useful? Imagine that by selecting an agent script messages can automatically be sent to the customer. Or maybe you could ping out a ticket number because a case has been created or updated. These kind of automations provide a consistent user experience and also make life easier for your agents.

When you install Live Assist a hosted control called “Chat Control” will be added. This hosted control has an action called SendMessage. Once you know this creating an action to send a message is simple.

In the data field enter “Message=<<your message>>”.

I have an example below that I call from an agent script to welcome the customer. Notice that I include a replacement parameter of [[systemuser.firstname]g], this will insert the agents name into the message.

Here is another example, in this one I send out the ticket number of a case each time a case is created. Notice that I have added the ticket n umber as a replacement parameter. “[[Incident.ticketnumber]]”

You could add an action like this to an agent script or maybe even directly on your case / incident hosted control.

If you want to automatically send this on create of a case you’ll need to be slightly creative! Firstly notice I have a condition. In this I am checking that I have a chat activity open. As I don’t want this action to fire when I am not chatting to a customer!

Next if you want it to be sent on create of a case you’ll need to add something to the Save event on your incident tab. You can’t “just” add this action! The reason being that it will fire before the save has finished, meaning you wouldn’t yet have the ticket number available as a replacement parameter.

Below you can see that I have added an Execute on expression true action to the saved event on my Incident tab. This type of action will wait until the condition is true before running its sub actions.

My action looked like this. You can see in the data field that I am basically going to wait until the case has been saved. (Meaning I have an Incident.Id!) Plus for good measure I am also confirming I have a chat activity!

My send message action has been added as a sub action on this execute on expression true action. And in turn the execute on expression true action has been added to the saved event on my incident. In my application the result is shown below. I hope you can appreciate that the message has been added to my chat and sent to the customer without the agent doing anything other than saving the case.

Tip:
I did say you’d need to be creative with this! If you want to ensure this message is sent once only then you’ll need to consider a further enhancement. As what I have shown will send the message each time the case is saved. Ideally you add an extra action to copy something into the context to say message sent. Then add a further condition to your execute on expression true action.

Hopefully I have given you enough information to see how the SendMessage action works and provided some ideas on how you might use it in your applications. Enjoy.