How do I allow guests to start a chat with a random Service Desk agent?

[Nicholas Jackson]

My company would like to use HipChat and Service Desk to manage IT cases. We really like the chat, but what we would like to do is be able to put a link in our webpages that allows the user to chat with a random agent. 

I saw this blog post about how someone else did it, but is it really necessary to build the entire chat API from scratch? 

I also saw this post about how to add the JQuery plugin which works great, but that is limited to a specific room. Am I going to have to create a new room for each private (1 on 1) conversation between a guest and an agent?

[Anatoli]

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for the question. You are right, we don't have out of the box solution for a general "customer chat" solution. It is something that comes up from time to time and we might be looking into it in the future.

In your case, do the people who want to chat with IT already have HipChat account? If they do you can just have a link like: https://<YOUR-DOMAIN>.hipchat.com/chat/room/<ROOM-NAME-OR-ID> and it will open the right room. This link will open a chat with a user https://<YOUR-DOMAIN>.hipchat.com/chat/user/<USER-ID> .

[Nicholas Jackson]

Yes, it is likely that they will already have HipChat accounts. 

So theoretically, if we had a list of all tech's user IDs in a list, could we use JavaScript to generate the HipChat link as https://<MY-DOMAIN>.hipchat.com/chat/user/<RANDOM-USER-ID> to basically simulate the "randomness" of who they chat with? And by clicking on that link, would that open a private chat with that agent?