Ideas on JSD automation for transition on comment 'race' condition

Jack Brickey
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October 25, 2016

I have been racking my brain on a situation that started occurring recently and am hoping others have some ideas on how to address. Let me set the stage w/ some background.

Scenario: a few days back I started seeing where, when an agent initiated the "Respond to customer" (RTC) transition and entered a comment for the customer/reporter, the status was not changing from "Waiting for support" (WFS) to "Waiting for customer" (WFC). 

Digging in: I found that in fact the issue was transitioning from WFS to WFC BUT immediately transitioning back to WFS. I figured this must be associated w/ automation so began inspecting my rule for Transition on comment that is intended to transition back to WFS as soon as the customer comments back to the agent. First blush everything looked ok but after walking away from it and thinking about it I wondered if it was sort of a 'race' condition. My theory was that the actual comment that the agent was entering in associated w/ the RTC action was being triggered by the automation rule mistaking the comment as being a response from the customer. Sure enough, disabling the rule resulted in the desired/expected behavior of the status transitioning and staying in the WFC state. Unfortunately, if the rule is left disabled then a comment back from the customer wan't result in transitioning back to WFS. sad

My question: How best to reconfigure my automation rule to deal with the issue. I have provided a picture of what I have today below. Note, that this is an internal IT helpdesk project and as such i have all employees listed as customers, including agents. I considered removing all agents from the customer list which would allow the current rule to work but for various reasons I don't want to do so unless there is no better solution.

I'm scratching my head as to what changed as I know this was working. I'm wondering if an update to the cloud recently occurred such that the state is transition before the comment is recorded. If the reverse was done then the 'race' condition would not be an issue.

All ideas welcome.

2 answers

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Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 25, 2016

Update: for now I have added 'user is not an agent' to my IF. so basically user = customer AND user ^= agent. It works for now but there are some corner cases to deal with.

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Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 25, 2016

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image2016-10-25 11:59:28.png

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