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Hi there,

With the Utah release ServiceNow introduced a new Store application called "Proactive Triggers". Reading the Docs, you might not instantly be able to imagine what is meant by Proactive Triggers, while it's pretty simple: Proactively a chat bubble on your Virtual Agent web client will pop-up for end users, depending on your settings.

With Proactive Triggers some of my older articles can be thrown away to achieve a custom chat bubble on Agent Chat configuration, it's now out-of-the-box and pretty easy to get going. Let's have a closer look!

Example Proactive Trigger

Activating Proactive Triggers

Proactive Triggers is a ServiceNow Store application that is available to all Virtual Agent web client and Agent Chat customers by default. You do have to activate this manually though.

1. In the plugin list, search for "Proactive Triggers" or "sn_pt", and install the plugin.

2. After installing the plugin, two System Properties must be set to value "true" (can also be done through the Conversation Interfaces page). The System Properties concerned are: a. "sn_pt.com.glide.cs.proactive_trigger.enabled"

b. "com.glide.cs.advanced-chat-popover"

Proactive Rules

When having the Proactive Triggers plugin and System Properties activated, there's one thing left: configuring "Proactive Rules". The Proactive Rules table can be opened through the Conversation Interfaces page or opening the table directly, "sys_cs_ptrigger_rule".

Out-of-the-box there are already two Proactive rules available. You can enable or edit these to see what they do and how Proactive rules are set up.

For example let's have a look at the "Virtual Agent greeting" Proactive rule. Switch to the "Proactive Triggers" Application Scope and just play around a bit with the record. Multiple Frequencies are available, for if the Trigger should only be shown once per visit, once per user, everytime. Or notice the delay, several options are available ranging from none to 3 minutes (and actually you can add your own choice, I did try ). Also the Trigger Type is an interesting field with options Portal Home, URL, Catalog Item, Knowledge. This makes that you can add Proactive Triggers in multiple ways for your Virtual Agent web client, from quite generic to very specific, nice!

Having set your Proactive rule, we are still missing something. What will actually be shown to the end users? On the Proactive rule, have a look at the Proactive Actions Related List. Adding or editing a Proactive Action, notice the Applies to field, which basically is to select a User Criteria like you will know it from several other places within ServiceNow.

The actual message is defined in the Message field, where you can use the TinyMCE editor to enrich your Message a bit. Similar like for example Notifications, you can also apply Variables in the Message.

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And that's it! Now up to you to activate Proactive Triggers and just play around with Proactive Rules. If any questions, let me know!

Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

Independent ServiceNow Consultant

4x ServiceNow Developer MVP

4x ServiceNow Community MVP

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