The Ultimate Guide to Implement Live Agent On Salesforce B2B Commerce

Even though the world has come a long way in the implementation of technology to replace human employees in many fields, there are some jobs that machines cannot be trusted with yet. Even the customers on B2B e-commerce portals feel the same.

One of the main B2B e-commerce features for which this can be said is customer support. While AI chatbots exist, at least 70% of customers prefer human agents over AI-powered tools.

There are many reasons for this, with 79% of customers favouring it because it provides instant responses compared to ticketing and querying systems.

This inclination towards live agents is evident from the fact that the customer satisfaction rate for it stands the highest at 92% and 63% of customers are expected to revisit a site after using the live chat feature on it.

There are many reasons why businesses add live chat to their B2B e-commerce platform. For example, the primary reason cited by 87% of companies is the wish to connect to their visitors in real-time.

It is followed by the opportunity to push for conversions, upsells, and cross-sells, as 61% of companies opine. Other reasons include visitor tracking and customer convenience.

It does not matter what the intention is behind B2B e-commerce companies adopting live chat facilities. There is no denying that it has only a positive impact on the B2B e-commerce sales of a company.

Salesforce Live Agent Features

The Salesforce B2B e-commerce software for adding live chat to your e-commerce site has the following features:

• Real-time live chat support
• Personalized messages
• Snap-ins
• Customer profile
• Customer chat sneak peek
• Multilingual support
• Chat routing
• Real-time agent coaching
• Private messages
• Pre-written messages
• Instant message sessions metrics
• Agent performance metrics
• Agent queue monitoring

It is worth noticing that many of these Salesforce live agent chat properties were directly borrowed from suggestions on Idea Exchange.

Therefore, if you feel you have a winning proposal, you can always drop it there. If you want to test out the software before using it, you can watch the Salesforce live agent demo.

In the Salesforce page for Service Cloud, the Live Agent Software link is found at the bottom under “Popular Searches”.

Step-By-Step Ecommerce Implementation Of Salesforce Live Chat Support

There are eight essential steps involved in the Salesforce ecommerce integration of live chat support. These are as follows:

1. Enabling live agent chat feature
2. Creating live agent chat users
3. Creating and assigning chat agents to specific skills
4. Creating configurations to impart functionalities to chat agents
5. Creating chat deployments to add to your Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud site
6. Creating chat buttons to allow customers to request Salesforce live chat
7. Customizing your Salesforce chat branding with Salesforce Sites
8. Setting up the live agent console app

We will now discuss these steps for Salesforce live chat integration in detail.

Enabling Live Agent Chat Feature

You have to first enable “Live Agent” in Salesforce to be able to add this feature to the B2B e-commerce market storefront.

You can do this by going to Setup in Salesforce Classic, then Customize, Live Agent, and finally, Live Agent Settings. Here click on the “Enable Live Agent” checkbox to activate it.

Alternatively, you can type in “Live Agent Settings” in the Quick Find box and click on it to directly go to this page. It is more comfortable, and it is what we will be doing from now on. Finally, click on the Save button.

Doing this will automatically create the following objects in Salesforce Org:

• Live Chat Visitors – Used to store information about every unique visitor and can be used for future references
• Live Chat Transcripts – Records every chat session and can be used to extract useful information
• Live Chat Transcript Events – Holds a timeline of important events for every chat session
• Live Agent Sessions – Contains information about every live agent concerning their participation in chats
• Live Agent Supervisor – Stores information about the activities of every live agent supervisor
• Live Agent – Just as above, stores information about the activities of each live agent
• Quick Text – Aids in storing and managing short text messages

Creating Live Agent Chat Users

To set a user as a live agent, search for Users in the Quick Find box and select it. Find the required User and click on Edit beside their name.

Click the Live Agent checkbox in the menu on the right. Now, keep in mind that this menu item will only appear if your company has bought the suitable B2B ecommerce live agent feature licenses. Finally, click Save to register the changes.

Also, make sure that the required permissions for each agent are enabled to ensure that they have access to the necessary tools they will need to perform their live chat functions.

Creating and assigning chat agents to specific skills

Search for “Skills” in the Quick Find box in Setup and select it. Then, click New. Provide a name for the skill. After that, like the users, you want to assign to this skill from the Assign Users section.

Similarly, from the Assign Profiles section, select the profiles to be connected to this skill. Once done, click Save.

Creating configurations to impart functionalities to chat agents

Just like before, search for “Live Agent Configurations” in the Quick Find box and select it. Click New and specify the necessary settings for Live Agent Configuration. These include:

• Basic Information

1. Chat Configuration Name
2. Developer Name
3. Chat Capacity
4. Sneak Peek Enabled
5. Request Sound Enabled
6. Disconnect Sound Enabled
7. Notifications Enabled
8. Custom Agent Name
9. Auto Greeting
10. Auto-Away on Decline
11. Auto-Away on Push Time-Out
12. Critical Wait Alert Time
13. Agent File Transfer Enabled
14. Visitor Blocking Enabled
15. Assistance Flag Enabled

• Assign Users
  1. Available Users
  2. Selected Users

• Assign Profiles
  1. Available Profiles
  2. Selected Profiles
• Supervisor Settings

1. 1. Chat Monitoring Enabled
   2. Whisper Messages
   3. Agent Sneak Peek Enabled
   4. Default Agent Status Filter
   5. Default Skill Filter
   6. Default Button Filter
   7. Assigned Skills

• Chat Conference Settings

1. 1. Chat Conference Enabled

• Chat Transfer Settings

1. 1. Chat Transfer to Agents Enabled
   2. Chat Transfer to Skills Enabled
   3. Chat Transfer to Skills
   4. Chat Transfer to Chat Buttons Enabled
   5. Chat Transfer to Chat Buttons

Finally, click Save.

Creating chat deployments to add to your Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud site

Search and select “Deployments” from the Quick Find box. Click New and again choose the desired settings for the deployment. These include:

• Basic Information

1. 1. Chat Deployment Name
   2. Developer Name
   3. Chat Window Title
   4. Allow Visitors to Save Transcripts
   5. Allow Access to Pre-Chat API
   6. Permitted Domains
   7. Enable Custom Timeouts
   8. Idle Connection Warning Duration
   9. Idle Connection Timeout Duration

• Chat Window Branding

1. 1. Branding Image Site
   2. Chat Window Branding Image
   3. Mobile Chat Window Branding Image

Now, click Save. It will generate the deployment code in Salesforce. Copy it and paste it on every webpage of your site where you want to provide Salesforce chat support.

Creating chat buttons to allow customers to request Salesforce live chat

Search for and select “Chat Buttons & Invitations” in the Quick Find box in Setup and click on New. In the Type field, choose Chat Button. Select the suitable settings for the chat button, which consist of:

• Basic Information

1. 1. Type
   2. Name
   3. Developer Name
   4. Language
   5. Enable Customer Timeout
   6. Customer Time-Out (seconds)
   7. Customer Timeout Warning (seconds)
   8. Custom Agent Name
   9. Auto Greeting

• Routing Information 

1. 1. Routing Type
   2. Skills
   3. Enable Queue
   4. Queue Size Per Agent
   5. Overall Queue Size
   6. Automatically Accept Chats

• Chat Button Customization

1. 1. Site for Resources
   2. Online Image
   3. Custom Chat Page
   4. Pre-Chat Form Page
   5. Pre-Chat Form URL
   6. Post-Chat Page
   7. Post-Chat Page URL

Click Save. Now copy and paste the code for the chat button on all the pages where you have deployed the live chat feature in the place where you want the button to appear.

Customizing your Salesforce chat branding with Salesforce Sites

For this, you will have to set up a Salesforce Site, providing a site label and name, a site contact, the active site’s home page, and a site template.

Now upload your branding images as static resources to load in the chat window when it is opened.

Setting Up The Live Agent Console App

Search for and select the “App” option in the Quick Find box. Click on New and then select the Console radio button to create a new console app.

In Step 6 of the app creation process, click on the “Include Live Agents in this App” and select the records or pages to be opened as subtabs at each chat session.

Final Thoughts

It is worth mentioning here that if you want to deploy omnichannel B2B commerce support, later on, you can include your existing live agent setup in it instead of redoing it entirely.

In fact, for a satisfying B2B e-commerce customer journey, it is recommended that you eventually implement advanced e-commerce solutions to shift to an omnichannel model.

You can get a better idea about this from here. If you are not sure how to go about implementing live chat support in Salesforce for better B2B e-commerce growth, you can always get in touch with us at Docmation for B2B commerce consulting.

Source: Live Agent On Salesforce B2B Commerce