Setting up live agent in Salesforce

Last Updated on March 20, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

These days’ customers expect fast replies and quick resolutions. With Live Agent web chat, you can give them quicker responses to their queries, at a minimal price to you. Live Agent provides users the ability to interact with the agents through webchat to get more information about specific product or queries. In this article, I will go through how setup Live Agent and various concepts related to it. This feature is available at Developer and Performance editions organizations created after June 14, 2012, and for Enterprise and Unlimited Editions, it’s available with an additional cost.

Perform the following steps to Chat (formerly Live Agent) in your org: 

1. Navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Setup | Feature Settings | Service | Chat (formerly Live Agent) | Chat Setting
2. Next,  select Enable Chat checkbox, as shown in the following screenshot:

Objects related to Chat (formerly Live Agent)

As soon as you enable Chat (formerly Live Agent) feature, few objects are auto-created in your organization. 

Chat Visitors – The Live Chat Visitor tab contains information about visitors that have participated in chat sessions. Below you can see sample chat visitor record.

Chat Transcripts:- The Live Chat Transcripts tab contains the transcripts of completed chat sessions. Below you can see sample chat transcript record. 

Chat Transcript Events:- Contain all information that contains chat request, accept request or route details and Visitor Left. Below you can see sample chat transcript event record.

Chat Sessions:- This Live Agent Sessions tab contains information about agent session, time spent online, time spent on chat, etc. Below you can see sample chat session record.

Quick Text :- Quick Text lets users create standard messages, such as greetings and answers to common questions, which support agents can easily insert into communications with customers. Quick Text is automatically enabled for organizations that have enabled Live Agent. If you want to create quick text click on Quick text (Tab) | New and fill the details as per your choice, you can take help from below screenshot:

Setting up Chat (formerly Live Agent) users

As soon as you enable Chat (formerly Live Agent) for your organization, next step is create user or grant existing users to required permission so they can work as live agent. To do that go to user record and select Chat User  (feature licenses) check-box as shown in below screenshot:

Note:- Chat (formerly Live Agent) users require API Enabled administrative permission on profile. Agents also need at least the “Read” permission on Live Chat Visitors and Live Chat Transcripts to review visitor and transcript records.

Enable skills and assign them to users

Skills classify the abilities of agents based on that you can route requests to the right set of agents. For example, if your support center handles both technical and non-technical issues, you would create separate “Technical” and “Non-technical” skills, and assign agents accordingly. Then, when a query comes in that requires technical expertise, Salesforce routes the request to those agents in the “Technical” skill set only. To create Skills follow the below instructions

• Navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Setup | Feature Settings | Service | Chat (formerly Live Agent) | Skills
  
• Click on New button, it will redirect you to a new page from where you can create new skills
• Enter Name, Users and Profile that have this skill then click on Save, as shown in below screenshot:

Chat Buttons and Automated Invitations

You need to create the buttons that visitors click to start chats. A button consists of several lines of JavaScript that you copy and paste into Web pages. Each button lets you refine the chat experience for visitors. For example, your organization could have different buttons for personal computer, laptop, or tablet issues. Each button is mapped to a different skill to make sure that visitors’ inquiries only go to agents who have the ability to solve their problems. To Create Chat button follow the below instructions

• Navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Setup | Feature Settings | Service | Chat (formerly Live Agent) | Chat Button & invitation 
  
• Click on New button, it will redirect you to a new page from where you to fill all required details to create a new chat button

• As soon as you click on Save you will get Chat button code, copy this code in notepad. It will look like below screenshot:

Create Deployments

To create deployment follow the instructions below: 

• Navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Setup | Feature Settings | Service | Chat (formerly Live Agent) | Deployments
• Click on New button, and fill all required details as shown in below screenshot:

• Click on Save, Salesforce will give you deployment code, it will look like the following screenshot:

Create a HTML page with “Chat Buttons” and “Deployments” code

First paste Chat button code then Deployment code add HTML tag into notepad, for best performance, paste the code right before the closing body tag (that is, </body>). replace the Online Chat Content and Offline Chat Content comments from Chat button code, below screenshot refer sample HTML page you can take reference from here 

It’s time to test this feature

Launch the Live agent console by navigating to account tab and click on live agent console, as shown in below screen shot

As soon as you launch it will open live agent console for you. Now open HTML page created by you and Click the link to chat with the Live Agent and you will get below screen

On the live agent side accept the invitation to chat with the user, same like below screen shot

In below screen you can see conversation between live agent and user

Note:- You can also use Live agent in Salesforce console or in the Force.com site.

In Spring’14 release Salesforce introduces few new features related to live agent, that are followings

1) Transfer Files During a Chat—Pilot –->Give Live Agent customers the ability to upload and transfer files to agents during a chat so they can easily share important information without leaving their chat window.

2) Supervisor Tab Available in Salesforce Console –> Add the Supervisor tab to the Salesforce console to give your Live Agent supervisors easy access to information about their agent’s activities without disrupting supervisors’ workflow.

3) Attach Records to Chat Transcripts –> Search for existing records or create new ones to attach to a transcript when you chat with Live Agent customers in the Salesforce console, giving you easy access to information related to the chat.