Chat for administrators

On this page

Introduction

In SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD), you can provide your customer end users with a fast, efficient method to engage with IT support. The Chat feature delivers instant access to agents who can offer assistance and resources to ensure smooth workflow productivity.

Navigation

Setup > Global Settings > Service Desk Settings.

Benefits

Benefits of incorporating chat into your service management processes:

• Improve employee and user satisfaction by providing a direct communication channel for instant interaction with agents.
• Connect end users to the resources they need in a timely manner.
• Increase the productivity of your agents by providing a chat queue that lets them efficiently engage simultaneously with multiple end users.
• Improve first-touch-resolution and time-to-resolution metrics, which can reduce your cost per ticket.

Chat is built into your service desk, with a back-end interface for agents and portal access for end users. This allows for easy implementation, management, and adoption, while you quickly incorporate chat into your service management strategy.

Best practices

To determine how to best integrate the chat feature within your workflow processes, review the following questions as they relate to your organization:

• When does chat help improve ticket management and workflows?
• What kind of traffic routes to our portal that can be most efficiently addressed via chat interactions?
• What hours will we provide chat support (business hours, days of the week, etc.)?
• What is an adequate number of agents to handle the chat queue most effectively?
• How will SLAs be influenced in respect to response times?

When determining chat hours of service, SolarWinds recommends you review the Incident Trend and Incident Heatmap reports. The trend report reflects the busiest days of the week, while the heatmap focuses on the busiest hours of the day. Analysis of your historical statistics provides details of when the service desk is most utilized, which assists in implementing workflow processes and the need to provide agent availability accordingly.

Enable chat

1. Navigate to Setup > Global Settings > Service Desk Settings.
2. Scroll down to Chat.
3. Set the toggle pill to On.

This enables direct communication between requesters and agents via the service portal and an inbound chat queue for agents.

Roles and permissions

By setting the permissions and restrictions capabilities, you control who in your service desk can assist in chats and who can request service via chat. This ensures the most relevant agents process the chats, and that applicable employees can access services via chat.

Navigate to Setup > Account > Roles & Permissions. Use the following guidelines to best meet your organizational needs:

Action	Subject	Scope	Description
Manage	Chat	Restrict by: Department Site	Create new chats from the portal Read/Accept chats based on scope
Create (New Chat)	Chat		Create a new chat from the portal Without this permission, the chat icon will not display in the portal
Read (Accept Chat)	Chat	Restrict by: Department Site	Participate in the chats you have visibility into Communicate with requesters Without this permission, the chat icon will not display on the platform side

Examples

Requesters

A requester who needs to be able to open a chat has the following permissions:

Chat - Create

Agents

An agent who needs the ability to work and open chats on the service portal can have the following permissions:

• Chat - Create
• Chat - Update

You can further customize the chat permissions by including site specifications. An agent who only needs to accept chats from a specific site (or sites) can have the following below. Notice the specifications in the Scope column.

An agent who does not respond to chats but needs the ability to open a chat from the service portal has the following permissions:

Chat - Create

Related topics

Chat for agents