Choose a Channel and Deploy Your Agent
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Select a deployment channel for your Help agent.
- Validate your agent's conversational responses using the preview panel.
- Deploy your agent to your website, portal, or voice channel.
Choose Your Channel
In the previous unit, you established your agent's identity and grounded it with knowledge. Now, it's time to choose a channel for your agent that fits your business.
All three channels—web chat, help portal, and voice—are available in the guided setup today. And you're not limited to a single channel. From the Add to Channels screen, you can add your agent to any combination of these channels, for example, web chat and voice together.
Beyond these three channels, the Help Agent also supports deployment to additional channels like WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. Configuring those channels requires manual setup outside the quick start flow. See the Agentforce documentation for instructions on adding agents to other service channels. Future releases of the quick start will include more channel options directly in this guided setup.
Channel 1: Web Chat for an Existing Website
If you have an existing external help site, this is the fastest path.
- Select Copy Code, then enter your website domain.
Salesforce automatically generates an asynchronous JavaScript code snippet mapped specifically to your site and your new agent. Before copying the snippet, you're asked to enter the domain of the website where you'll deploy the agent (for example, yourcompany.com). This is a security requirement—the generated JavaScript is authorized to run only on the domain you specify. If someone copies your snippet and drops it onto an unauthorized domain, the agent won't activate. This protects your agent and your customers' data.
- Paste the snippet into the HTML header or footer of your external website's Content Management System (CMS).
Channel 2: Help Portal (Agentforce Customer Service Portal)
If you don't have an existing help site—or want a purpose-built AI-first experience—you can deploy to a help portal directly from this flow. This portal is an Agentforce Customer Service Portal. Clicking this option gives you a sample portal with a prompt bar and conversation interface to get started quickly. It is a starter portal — not a fully customized, production-ready site. Think of it as your foundation. You can extend it later through Experience Builder to add suggested themes, personalizations, branded components, and multiple workflow-driven agents. Building a full-featured portal is a more complex topic covered in separate documentation in the Resource section below.
When you open your help portal link to preview or test it, open it in an incognito (private) browser window. The Help Agent portal is currently enabled for guest users only. An incognito window lets you experience the portal exactly as an unauthenticated customer would, without your own Salesforce login session interfering. If you open the link in a regular window where you're already signed in to Salesforce, it won't accurately represent the guest user experience.
Channel 3: Voice from Agentforce Contact Center or Telephony Partners
You can also deploy your agent as a voice AI agent. The setup walks you through configuring greetings, choosing a voice tone, assigning a default phone number, and setting an escalation path (including handoff to human agents). Voice deployment integrates with Agentforce Contact Center and Salesforce telephony partners.
Whichever channel–or combination of channels–you choose for your agent, you can preview and test it in the built-in preview mode before going live.
Put Your Agent to the Test
The Help Agent guided setup includes a built-in testing environment so you can validate your agent's behavior before it ever interacts with a real customer. You can test how well your agent learned the material you grounded it on before it goes live.
- In the Preview Agent section, start a conversation with your agent.
- Pretend to be a customer and ask the agent questions based on the knowledge you grounded it on. The agent provides you with the specific sources of knowledge for its responses.
You can test the agent's boundaries. Ask it a question that isn’t covered in the grounded knowledge. A well-grounded agent should politely decline to answer or offer to route you to a service rep, rather than hallucinating or making up an answer. If the agent isn't answering correctly, select the Back button to adjust your knowledge.
If the agent can’t find a good answer, verify its ability to create and escalate a case right from the preview screen.
Remember that if you're testing your live help portal (rather than the built-in preview), you’ll want to open the portal link in an Incognito window so you're testing as a guest user.
- When you're happy with your agent's responses, select Continue. The guided setup takes you to a screen where you confirm activation. There's no separate activate button. This final screen is also your testing hub. From here, you can go back and test any of your agent's configured functionalities and channels before sharing it with customers.
You can deactivate your agent anytime from the Agentforce Builder or Manage Agents section on the Help Agent page in Salesforce Go.
Congratulations! Your Agentforce Help Agent is live and answering customer questions around the clock.
Manage and Extend Your Agents
After you complete the guided setup, Salesforce drops you into the Build and Manage Your Agents page. This view shows all Help Agents you've created, their version numbers, and their current status (Draft, Active, or Inactive). Use this view to:
- Create additional agents for other parts of your business.
- Manage agent versions. Each time you edit and redeploy an agent, a new version is created so you can track changes over time.
- Navigate to Agent Builder for deeper customization. From the list view, click any agent to open it in the full Agentforce Agent Builder, where you can add custom actions, topics, and integrations beyond what the guided setup provides.
Your Help agents are Agentforce agents. They aren't isolated—they operate alongside any other agents you build, and you can extend them with the same tools (actions, flows, Apex) available across the Agentforce platform.
Sum It Up
In just a few steps, you grounded an AI agent in your own knowledge and deployed it to the channels your customers already use. From here, you can fine-tune its knowledge, add more channels, or build additional agents for other parts of your business.