Your Live Agent Adventure Begins Here..

Salesforce gives me a chance to fall in love with it again and again when I come across the splendid features it dispenses. Less did I know that I will be able set up an application that would help me interact with people from worldwide? Yes, I have done it! And even you can do it. How? The solution is LIVE AGENT.

Live Agent enables, support agents to talk to their customers in real time. It is a remarkable feature provided by Salesforce that facilitates us design WEB CHAT which is a faster and a more personal way for you to engage with your customers. So, in a nutshell, live agent helps us do our favorite act i.e CHAT!

Setting up Live Agent is a piece of cake. Following are some noteworthy points that one must consider while setting up live agent.

1) SKILLS

A skill is an ability to do something well. In Live agent, we are provided with a facility to configure skills. A skill is required so that the chats are routed to the right agent at the right time. If there are support agents who are proficient at answering technical queries related to a product, then a skill can be configured for such agents. Once we create a skill, we have an option to assign users to this skills.

2) LIVE AGENT CONFIGURATIONS

This amazing facility enables us to control the features that will be available to the agents and supervisors in the Service cloud console. Supervisors are the ‘agents’ who can monitor the ongoing chats. Features like notification sounds, supervisor management are all configured in live agent configuration. So, one can configure it as required.

3) CHAT BUTTONS AND AUTOMATED INVITATION

A chat button enables us to configure buttons which are to be placed on the site from where chats can be initiated. Every chat button has an associated skill with it and after configuring it, a button code is generated. Buttons allows us to control how to route the chats to the agents, which prechat and post chat pages must be used, what should be the agent queues lengths etc. Along with chat buttons we have another type of button “automated invites”. These are animated buttons which can popup on sites.

 

4) CHAT DEPLOYMENTS

When we configure a chat deployment, live agent generates a script for us which is to be included in a HTML page along with the chat button. This is the HTML code which should be hosted on the site in order to initiate chat sessions. Additionally, we can also control chat window branding and pre chat API access through chat deployments.

After we configure all the above there a challenge that, SF withholds us from adding one user to multiple live agent configurations at a time.

Consider a plot, where an agent is proficient in "Customer Service" as well as "Technical Support". Such an agent will have a mandate to be present in 2 "live agent configurations".

SF disallows this! If you assign the same user to a second live agent configuration, the system removes that user from the first live agent configuration without warning you.


HOW TO deal with this?

1. Configure 'SKILLS' in such a way that the agent is included in both Customer Service and Technical Support
2. Configure 'BUTTONS' for both the skills
3.  Configure a 'LIVE AGENT CONFIGURATION' that includes the Mathematical UNION of the above skills.

Woo-hoo! That solves it!

To learn more:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.workbook_service_cloud.meta/workbook_service_cloud/service5_intro.htm




Written by Neha Sonawane, Salesforce Developer at Eternus Solutions