Make Your Chat Work for You
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe features that maximize your agents’ productivity, like Quick Text and customer timeout.
- Describe features that will wow your customers, like proactive chat invitations and queue position.
Maximize Your Agents’ Productivity
Web chat is already an efficient customer service tool, but we’ve baked in some features that can help your agents do more, faster. Let’s take a look at some of the most useful chatting tools that you can give to your support team.
That’s a lot of productivity. These tools let agents anticipate customer needs, respond faster, and keep their capacity for more chats wide open.
| Feature | What It Does | Where to Turn It On |
|---|---|---|
| Sneak peek | Lets the agent see what the visitor is typing before they hit Send. | Chat Configuration |
| Chat transfer | Lets agents transfer a chat to another agent or group of agents. | Chat Configuration |
| Quick Text | Lets you create standardized messages that agents can access during a chat. This saves them the trouble of typing out the same responses over and over, and it keeps your messaging consistent. | Quick Text in Setup |
| Push timeout | Routes the chat request to another agent when the first agent doesn’t accept or decline in a set number of seconds. | Omni-Channel Routing Configuration |
| Customer timeout | Ends the chat when the customer doesn’t respond in a set number of seconds. You can also display a warning before the chat ends to give them a chance to speak up. | Chat Button |
| Decline reasons | Lets agents select from a list of reasons when they decline a work request. | Omni-Channel Presence Configuration |
| Visitor blocking | Lets agents block a customer who’s spamming or otherwise violating your terms of service. | Chat Configuration |
Wow Your Customers with Amazing Chat Features
Customer service is about the customer, and there are ways that you can improve their chat experience, too. Let’s take a look at a few features you can use to dazzle and amaze your loyal customers.
| Feature | What It Does | Where to Turn It On |
|---|---|---|
| File transfer | Lets agents request a file from the customer during a chat. For example, a customer can send an image of their broken solar panel to help the agent identify which part they should send. | Chat Configuration |
| Proactive chat invitations | Provides an animated chat invitation that appears based on certain criteria. For example, if the customer moves their mouse toward the Close button on their browser, or when the customer reaches $100 in their shopping cart. | Chat Button, Embedded Chat Settings |
| Fill in pre-chat fields | Saves customers from having to type out information that you already know, like their name. This only works if your customers have to log into your website or Experience site. | Embedded Chat Settings |
| Queue position | Displays the customer’s place in line while they wait for an agent. | Chat Button, Embedded Chat Settings |
| Lightning components for various chat states | Lets you fully customize your chat window's appearance with Lightning Components. | Developer Console |
Chat On!
Maria has tested web chat and is ready to add it to Ursa Major Solar’s website. After she’s done with the launch, here’s how she can expand Ursa Major Solar’s service channels based on what she set up today.
You just followed Maria as she set up live web chat, added branding, and created pre-chat and offline support forms. Plus, you’ve learned about some simple ways that you can get the most out of this robust customer support channel. Now get chatting!
| Channel to Add | Salesforce Offering | How It’s Related |
|---|---|---|
| Routing for other work, like cases, alongside chats | Omni-Channel | Delivers different types of work items together based on each item’s size and priority, and on your agents’ capacity to take on work. |
| Embed service channels natively into a mobile app | Embedded Service SDK for Mobile Apps |
Uses Mobile SDK for iOS or Android to provide service channels like web chat and Knowledge into a mobile app. |
