If you use Salesforce Live Agent Chat, or have an interest in using it, here are a few enhancements that have come about in 2013 that you need to know about.
Live Agent i18n Support
Multi-Lingual Support
Live Agent Chat now boasts enhanced multi-lingual support with localized greeting messaging per chat button and per agent. Live Agent also now offers the ability to view the language of the incoming chat session (button) in the queue before an agent accepts the chat. Invaluable changes for agents, particularly in the Americas or EMEA, who often support more than one language (e.g: English, Spanish & French).
Chat Transfer
Live Agent Chat now allows agents to transfer chats to other agents who maybe more qualified to answer a particular inquiry, or situations where an escalation is called for. Again, a key enhancement that unblocks a previous dead-end for support agents.
Supervisor Controls Including Agent Whispering
My favorite enhancement in Live Agent, the Supervisor Tab allows for greater visibility of agent workload & live metrics such as handle time and wait time. Whispering is also now supported where supervisors can jump in and assist agents within the chat session without the chat visitor noticing. A great tool to use while new agents grow towards proficiency.
Proactive Chat Invites
Chat now supports proactive invites, a powerful sales & marketing tool. If for example your site visitor is fumbling around through different product pages, Salesforce can be configured to offer a chat invite to site visitors. Or from a support perspective, imagine a high value customer is creating a case in your portal, why not invite them to chat for a better user experience?
Tab Warnings
Idle time warning alerts are now configurable out of the box. A powerful feature, especially for early chat adopters who may start small with a handful of agents managing multiple concurrent chat sessions.
Each of these features released in 2013 compliment the existing Live Agent feature set including:
- Branding – upload logos or apply css to chat windows and buttons
- Pre-chat forms – request visitor details upfront
- Post-chat forms – capture feedback or present marketing material post chat
- Canned Messages / Quick Text – standardize the support experience and increase efficiency
- Integrated Knowledge Support – leverage integrated knowledge to deflect, train agents, and teach the visitor to self-assist
All very valuable 2013 product enhancements that early adopters of Live Agent need to leverage. I’m looking forward to more of the same in 2014!
We’re having trouble implementing liveagent chat, alongside proactive chat. We’re unable to initiate the ‘showWhenOnline/Offline’ liveagent object calls when we also have a proactive chat deployment.
We’re having trouble implementing liveagent chat buttons on the same page we are implementing liveagent proactive chat.
We are unable to hook/call the liveagent.showWhenOnline/Offline for the normal button deployments, when we have a deployment for a proactivechat modal on the same page.
How should we configure idle time alerts? Please let me know the steps
Hi Mike
thanks for an interesting article. We’re using live chat, abd were considering using the chat transfer feature, jhwoever we noticed an unfortunate side effect: when a chat is transferred, the releated case and contact drop off the transcript.
Have you noticed the same issue? if so – have you found a solution for it? (SFDC support state is is ‘working as designed’ …)
We are trying to analyze concurrent chats for resources. We would like a report of the data with the Chat ID, resource, start time, stop time and any other data associated with the chat would be create. With this we can create the information we need around employees and concurrency.