Explore Enhanced Chat
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List some key differences between legacy Chat and enhanced Chat.
- Describe the benefits of migrating for your support team and customers.
- Explain why the upgrade timeline is important, and plan accordingly.
Why Migrate?
Salesforce is retiring its legacy Chat product on February 14, 2026. If your business currently uses legacy Chat on your website or mobile app, you must migrate to its modernized replacement, enhanced Chat (formerly called Messaging for In-App and Web), before this date. Legacy Chat is already in maintenance mode, meaning it doesn’t receive updates or new features other than security updates.
The good news is that migrating isn’t just about avoiding a service disruption. Enhanced Chat offers a significant upgrade from legacy Chat, providing a more scalable and flexible platform for customer interactions. Migrating is an opportunity to enhance your customer service capabilities and provide a more seamless experience for your customers and support team.
Benefits for Customers
Here’s how customers benefit when you migrate to enhanced Chat.
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Interactive content: With clickable messaging components, customers get the interactive, visually rich experience that they expect from most modern messaging channels. Reps can also send file attachments and emoji.
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Personalized service from Agentforce: When you add an AI agent to your implementation, customers can get their problem solved with minimal wait time.
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Platform improvements: The unified platform that supports enhanced Chat offers improved service availability, better performance, fewer dropped chats, and scalability.
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Asynchronous, persistent messaging: Customers can start a conversation, pause it, and pick it back up later from the same or a different device or browser tab, without losing context. This means no more starting over if they get disconnected or need to step away. Customers and reps can scroll up to see their conversation history, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
Benefits for Service Reps
On the other side of the screen, service reps also benefit. Here’s how.
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Consistent experience across channels: Enhanced Chat is built on Salesforce’s unified conversation platform, shared with channels like Service Cloud Voice and enhanced WhatsApp. This gives reps a consistent interface and experience, making onboarding easier and streamlining workflows.
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Advanced features: Beyond the familiar chat functionalities, reps can send file attachments, use Enhanced Omni-Channel features like Omni Inbox, and message from the Salesforce mobile app. In the Enhanced Conversation component, they can send quick text, messaging components, files, emoji, and more. And enhanced channels work with time-saving AI features like work summaries and conversation catch-up.
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User verification: With user verification, reps can see the customer’s whole conversation history. This helps them understand the customer’s problem quickly and give better support.
Benefits for Admins and Supervisors
Last, admins and supervisors have more options for monitoring and reporting on messaging activity and key performance indicators (KPIs).
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Supervisor capabilities: Supervisors get a bird’s-eye view of their support team—both service reps and AI agents—in the Omni Supervisor wallboard. They can customize the tabs and layout in Omni Supervisor.
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Richer analytics: An updated data model provides deeper insights into conversation metrics, rep performance, and customer satisfaction. Supervisors can also set up conversation intelligence rules that alert them if a certain keyword is used in a messaging session, like “broken” or “supervisor”.
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Scalability: Enhanced Chat is built on Hyperforce, which can handle high volumes of messages and more complex interactions.
Key Differences: Legacy Chat Versus Enhanced Chat
While both products provide web and mobile app chat functionality, they have some fundamental differences. Let’s walk through the top-three differences.
Difference 1: Pre-Chat
Pre-chat is a valuable opportunity to collect information from a customer before connecting them with a service rep. While pre-chat in enhanced Chat offers similar features as pre-chat in legacy Chat, its underlying structure differs. This means that you set up a new pre-chat experience when you migrate.
During setup, you can use these pre-chat features.
- Add visible and hidden fields.
- Prompt users to accept your terms and conditions.
- Customize the pre-chat form with Lightning web components.
- Use the pre-chat API to pass customer info from pre-chat fields to the service rep.
Difference 2: Routing
To route messages in enhanced Chat, you use an Omni-Channel flow. A flow gives you the flexibility to route to AI agents, queues, or directly to a service rep according to conditions that you set. Your flow can use pre-chat form inputs to find customer records, like contacts or orders, that can then be associated with the messaging session. You’re also managing your routing logic in Salesforce; with legacy Chat, routing decisions required code changes to your website page, making change management challenging.
If you’re already using Omni-Channel routing in a conversation channel, the setup and concept of Omni-Channel will be familiar. If you’re new to Omni-Channel, we’ve got a Trailhead module for that.
Difference 3: Data Model and Reporting
Enhanced Chat uses a different data model than legacy Chat, which impacts how you report on service performance. For example, the new Messaging Session Metrics object measures response time and message count, and the AgentWork object measures handle time and speed to answer. When you migrate, be prepared to replace your current reports with new reports based on the objects used in enhanced Chat.
What About Licenses?
If you’re using legacy Chat, you also have access to enhanced Chat–with one caveat! Some businesses might need to upgrade to Digital Engagement to use enhanced Chat. To check your access, go to the Messaging Settings page in Setup. Click New Channel, then click Next, and check whether Enhanced Chat (or Messaging for In-App and Web) appears as a channel type. If it doesn’t appear, you must upgrade to Digital Engagement.
Now that you have a better idea of what enhanced Chat offers, it’s time to walk through a migration from beginning to end.