3 Quick Tips on Live Agent Implementation

Last week, Dreamforce was in full swing. From Sustainable Development Goals to Customer 360, the conference offered a lot of great content.

Talking to several customers though, we realized that implementing Live Agent is at the top of the list for many Fortune 500 companies. Hence, we wanted to share a couple of tips about what you need to do to make such implementations a success.

If you are interested in leveraging Live Agent and need consultation on the implementation, we can help you extend this functionality to further drive customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

Quick Tip 1: Beware of different chat implementation use cases

Not every live agent implementation is created equal. Chat is being often implemented on your website and it is primarily to talk to your customers (more common in B2C). Yet, some implement chat in a Salesforce Community (more common in B2B setting).

Regardless of what your use case is, how to initiate the experience, and how to end it with your customers are crucial.

• Pre-chat windows help determine what information to collect before the chat is transferred to the appropriate agent.
• Post-chat action such as surveys (or case creation) is also a common method to assure continuous improvement within the organization.

Reading through the first part of the Next Generation Live Agent series will give you clues on which questions to ask before implementing Service Cloud in an organization.

Quick Tip 2: Understand Benefits and Limitations of Implementing Omnichannel Routing for Chats

There are two ways to implement routing: Chat Routing and Omni-channel Routing.

Here are how these models compare:

• For chat routing, agents must chat with customers in the console in Salesforce Classic. On omnichannel routing, agents can chat with customers in the console in either Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience.
• Chat routing requires agents to use the Omni-Channel widget in Salesforce Classic to handle their work. Agents use the Omni-Channel widget in Salesforce Classic or the Omni-Channel utility in Lightning Experience to handle their work.
• On chat routing, Agents associate records with the chat transcript only after the chat has ended. For omnichannel, agents can associate records with the chat transcript during the chat. Agents can associate records on the chat transcript itself or use a console sidebar lookup component in Salesforce Classic.

While there are several limitations, omnichannel routing is the only option if the plan is to implement Chat in the Lightning Experience.

Quick Tip 3: Consider Skills-based Routing on Omni-channel

If you decide to go for Omni-channel, queues are a bit of an outdated way to assign chats to agents. Agents can be assigned to chat based on their skills. As a tremendous way to boost productivity and improve customer satisfaction, skills-based routing should be carefully modeled on Salesforce. A quick list of suggestions to determine what these skills might be:

• What are the main topics your agents need to know to serve your customers? You should be able to rank the knowledge of your agents on these main topics to further improve the customer experience.
• What are customers looking for?
• What are differentiating factors when the chat is about a product vs service?

Check out the second part of our Next Generation Live Agent series to better understand the benefits of skills-based routing.

In general, Live Agent on Lightning is a very promising yet relatively new functionality. Contact us if you are interested in implementing Live Agent!

If you want to learn more about a Next-Generation Live Agent, we recommend you to take a look at our Enhanced Omnichannel Skills-Based Routing Solution, S-Route.