Live Assist for USD - Events

Events

The preceding sections, on Hosted Controls and Action Calls, are useful in understanding the out-of-the-box behavior of Live Assist, but they don’t offer much insight into how that behavior could be modified or extended.This will become clearer as we introduce the concept of Events.

Events are what Hosted Controls use to signal to other components that something interesting has occurred.For example, maybe a contact record has finished loading, or an agent has just grabbed a new chat off the queue.Perhaps another Hosted Control would like to take action in response to these occurrences, but Hosted Controls have no direct knowledge of one another; they can, however, communicate by raising Events.

Like Action Calls, an Event must be associated with a Hosted Control - typically, the Hosted Control where something “interesting” occurred.But an Event can also be associated with one or more Action Calls; this is how other components are able to “react” to an event as it happens: Hosted Control A triggers an event, and as a result, we invoke an Action Call on Hosted Control B. 

Given this description, we can start to think about extensibility in terms of calling actions in response to events.We will begin this discussion with a list of events that are triggered by Live Assist Hosted Controls.If you have another USD application, simply invoke its action calls in response to Live Assist events, and you have an integration.

But extensibility works both ways: you can also invoke Action Calls on Live Assist Hosted Controls in response to Events triggered by other Hosted Controls.We will also explore how this mechanism is leveraged to create some tight integrations with Live Assist right out of the box.

Live Assist Events

Chat Activity

Chat Context

Chat Control

Chat Search Page

Co-browse Control

Presence Control

Other Interesting Events

One way to extend the Live Assist application is to listen for events triggered by Live Assist components, and take action accordingly.This approach also works in the opposite direction: you can listen for events triggered by other components, and invoke actions on Live Assist objects.For example, you may wish to associate action calls with one (or all) of the events listed below.

Advanced: Finding More Events 

Within you Dynamics 365 CRM you can view the complete list of Active Events.

If you Select:  Settings > Unified Service Desk > Events you can review all the registered Events:

If you click on an event, you can see specifics parameters of each Event:

Using Events and Actions

Many of the workflows you see in the USD happen as a result of chaining events and actions: one component triggers an event, which results in an action call, which triggers further events, and so on.In fact, by piecing together some of the events and actions listed above, you can understand what happens when an agent grabs an authenticated chat.

The act of clicking on “Grab a Chat” results in 3 Action Calls on the Chat Hosted Control:

1. Chat Session Switch
2. Opening New Chat
3. Chat Activity Created

The last of these, Chat Activity Created, results in no further events, but the other two action calls start the “Event Chains” described below.The first chain sets up a USD session, and the second one initiates the chat conversation.

Chat Session Switch

Opening New Chat

Save for the first Action Call listed above, Invoke Chat Action Call, the other actions take place in the new USD session that was created in the previous “Event Chain”.

Summary

The Unified Service Desk (USD) is comprised of Hosted Controls, Action Calls, and Events.Live Assist delivers several of each “out of the box”, but you can extend the functionality of Live Assist in one of two ways:

1. Invoke your own Action Calls in response to Live Assist Events.
2. Invoke Live Assist Action Calls in response to your own Events.