Let’s Chat About Salesforce Chat

I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people who hates talking on the phone. In fact, I won’t even order a pizza 🍕 unless I can do it through an app and not have to talk to anyone. On platforms where I have subscriptions, I totally appreciate chat as a service channel and prefer it over most other channels. My company started using chat heavily on our website about a year and a half ago (after sort of using it for like 5 years). It started out as being for just marketing and sales, where chat was used to help people find content and reduce cart abandonment. We found though that most people who wanted to chat were actually there to ask questions about the products and get support. In fact, about 50% of all our chat conversations are support related, and I think its actually higher than this, its just hard to extract the data…

For the last year or so, we’ve been using a 3rd party tool for chat. It gets the job done, but has some disadvantages. Here are some things I don’t like about it:

• Getting chat data into Salesforce is not straight forward and requires a lot of development time and dollars, and even though there is an installed package, it doesn’t have everything I need or want
• Our customer data is in Salesforce, so it is difficult to show customer data to agents in their chat console or even know who the customer is when the chat starts
• In order to convert a chat into a case or even relate a chat to a case, agents have to copy and paste information into Salesforce
• The actual chat data, like number of messages, how many agents did it take to close a chat, etc – is siloed and hard to analyze
• To customize most anything we have to submit ideas and wait for them to implement on their roadmap

I mentioned to our service team that Salesforce also has a chat solution and that we already own it – it’s part of Service Cloud! If we just implemented Salesforce Chat, we’d not only be saving money on the cost of that external platform, but we’d also be chatting from the same place our data lives – connecting our agents with our customer data and giving them all the power of Service Cloud. It didn’t take much convincing and soon enough I was scoping out our Salesforce Chat solution!

I’ve been working on the implementation over the last month and it’s actually been really fun. Not only did I get to work with Omni Channel and all the Chat features, but I got to learn all about Einstein Bots, design the chat console to include Customer 360 information, and architect a rad reporting solution in Tableau CRM. I think the Einstein Bots were my favorite part and I’m excited to keep working on our bot, Robot Downey, Jr. (thanks Tracie!), to make it smarter and smarter! Of course, as with any new project, there have been some gotchas, some ah-ha moments, stress induced nightmares, and moments of joy.

Maybe you’ve already implemented Chat and can relate to my nightmares, or maybe you’re looking for help or even motivation in getting started. I’m here to tell you all about it no matter how or why you ended up here 🤔😎.

For my first magic trick…

Let’s start by enabling Chat! To enable Salesforce Chat you’ll need:

• Performance Edition or Developer Edition org that was created after June 14, 2012
• Essentials, Unlimited, or Enterprise Edition org with Service Cloud or Sales Cloud

I feel like that covers everyone?

Enabling chat is as simple as searching for Chat Settings in the setup menu and then clicking a checkbox.

Seriously, that’s it. Of course, there’s more to do after that… which instead of me telling you about, I highly recommend you just do this Web Chat Basics Trailhead module. It walks you through how to use the guided setup flow that creates the basics for you and explains how and what its doing. I know when not to recreate the wheel! I have more posts lined up because I’m so excited for Salesforce Chat and will link them all here when I get them published!

• Let’s chat about Salesforce Chat (that’s this post!)
• Are you smarter than an Einstein Bot?
• The hiccups, headaches and eventual relief of chat routing
• Up close and personal with Omni Supervisor
• Extend your chat reporting with Tableau CRM
• Balancing agent capacity with more than one work item type (wow this needs a better title!)
• Chat learning roundup: what was helpful and what wasn’t
• It’s all about the flow: Pre-Chat Context

What else do you want to know and learn about Salesforce Chat?