These steps describe how a user requests a chat, how the service determines whether to route the chat request to a digital assistant, and what can happen after the chat request is routed to the digital assistant.

1. A user submits a chat request from the live help launch page

2. To determine where to route the chat request, the service completes these steps:

   1. It uses rule processing to decide which queue to route the chat request to.

   2. It looks up the agents that are assigned to the queue, and then routes the chat request to an available agent. It could be a human agent or a digital assistant agent.

   You'll learn how to configure this setup in Task 2: Configure the Service.

3. If the agent is a digital-assistant agent, then the conversation is routed to the digital assistant that's associated with the agent's DA-as-Agent channel. Otherwise, it's routed to a human agent. When the conversation is routed to a digital assistant, the subject is passed as the initial utterance. The other values that the user entered on the live help launch page are passed in a customFields array as described in Access Contact and Chat Launch Page Information.

   You'll learn how to associate a digital assistant with an agent's DA-as-Agent channel in Task 3: Sign Your Digital Assistant into the Service.

4. The service opens a chat that's connected to the agent or digital assistant and the user can start the conversation.

5. If the agent is a digital-assistant agent, it can transfer the conversation to a human agent, just like a human agent can transfer a conversation to another human agent. When this happens, the service uses rule processing to decide which queue to route the transferred chat request to.

   You'll learn how to transfer the conversation to a human agent in Enable Transfer to a Human Agent. You'll learn how to set up the rules for this transfer in Task 2: Configure the Service.