Live Agent chat and communities

In the previous section, we saw how work items can be automatically routed to agents, and live chats are similar to work items. Live Agent lets customers chat in real-time with support agents.

Using Live Agent, supervisors can even inspect their agent’s chat and assist them by whispering messages (these messages can only be seen by agents). Let’s think of them as live suggestions.

Live Agent can be fully customized using point and click; however, the platform delivers a set of APIs that can be used by developers to empower the chat experience.

Salesforce Community setup

Before talking about the Live Agent’s configuration, let’s spend some time talking about Salesforce Communities. This is a big topic and we would need to write an entire book to cover everything, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t provide a quick overview.

We talked about communities in Chapter 1, Secure Data Access, but now, we are going to show the steps that are required to create a new community.

We are introducing communities at this point because we’ll be using the web chat from within a community to enhance the service support experience.

To get started:

1. click on Setup | Feature Settings | Communities | Communities Settings
2. check the Enable communities flag
3. choose a domain name that will be used to look up your communities.

I’ve chosen adv-admin-community-01, which translates to https://adv-admin-community-01-developer-edition.eu19.force.com. This is where the Developer Edition has been added (because it is a Developer Edition organization); eu19 is the instance name (in production, we won’t have this). Click on Check Availability to check whether the domain has already been taken by someone else. Click Save to start creating a new community.

Click on New Community to start the community wizard.

The first thing you need to choose is the community template. We have the following options:

• Help Center: A public self-service community where we expose the KB.
• Customer Account Portal: A help center that’s designed for customers. Here, they can access their data and update it.
• Customer Service: A responsive self-service template with multiple prebuilt themes. It provides questions and allows us to search for articles, collaborations, and case access.
• Aloha: A base app launcher that supports single sign-on (including social logins) for quick application access.
• Visualforce and Tabs: A template where developers can completely customize any page using Visualforce technology. This is not Lightning-based and doesn’t work with the Community Builder.
• Partner Central: A sales partner-dedicated template.
• Build your own: A base template with all the basic features (login, home, password management, record/record list base pages, and so on). We can customize these using themes and branding.

Each community template can access specific prebuilt pages/components and features. For a complete list, please refer to Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=rss_component_reference_table.htm&type=5.

Choose Help Center as our community template. A new quick setup wizard will open up.

Fill in the community’s name (for example, Awesome Service Site), as well as the community’s URL, though this is optional (let’s say we want to use awesomeservice. In our example, the final URL will be https://adv-admin-community-01-developer-edition.eu19.force.com/awesomeservice). Check the Publish my help center after completing setup flag to automatically publish the community once the wizard is completed.

Because we have set up the required knowledge, the wizard asks for data categories to be used as community topics (we’ll leave this blank; we don’t need it. You can skip the next step as well, which is where we can select knowledge authors). The wizard should terminate upon success and we should see Community Workspaces, which is where we can administer the community.

From here, we can access the following features:

• Builder: This is a point-and-click app where we can set up security, branding, themes, and configure all the pages in our community, as well as add standard and custom Lightning components. After making changes, hit the Publish button to publish your changes.
• Administration: Sets up various preferences, such as community state (active, not active), template type, allowed members for authenticated access (with profiles and permission sets), login branding, email settings, and much more.
• Moderation: This is all about discussion moderation.
• Content management: Articles, topics, and recommendations.
• Gamification: From here, you can set up gamification to increase engagement.

For an in-depth Salesforce Communities study on this topic, please refer to Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_overview.htm&type=5.

This is all we need for the Live Agent’s configuration. Now, let’s look at how we can set up the Live Agent.