5 Easy Steps to Configure Salesforce Live Agent

Live Agent is a native Salesforce tool that provides the ability to interactively communicate with your web site users. Once you have an active deployment of live agent, you will be able to chat with you site visitors in live time. The information collected during the chat can then be saved into your Salesforce instance and reported on. This is a great way to get valuable user feedback and at the same time provide a much needed service to people navigating your website.

You can get started with Live Agent by first contacting Salesforce.com to setup your particular instance of Salesforce with Live Agent. Live Agent does come at an additional cost and it is only available for Enterprise and Performance editions of the Service Cloud.

1. Getting Started:

Once Live Agent is enabled for your org, you will be able to view the following Live Agent options in the start-up menu. Go to Setup -> Build -> Customize -> Live Agent.

Note: If Live Agent is not yet enabled these options will not be listed.

2. Create you user skills

The first step to implementing Live Agent is to set up Skills for users. These skills will allow you to tag the people who will be chatting with your web site visitors. You may want to have a range of skills for subject area experts. For example, you may have a hardware specialist and a software expert. By making good use of the user skills you can route the right questions to the right place quickly. Be sure not to overcomplicate the user skills with too many options, there needs to be at least one employee for each skill in order for the skill to be useful.

3. Create your Live Agent Button

Once you have created the user skills, you can move on to the next step of creating a new button. The button is where you can connect what user skills are needed for people who click on the button. Other settings that are at the button level include; Button images, Pre or Post – Chat Forms, custom agent names, routing type, auto greeting, and Language.
It is highly advisable to carefully review the Chat Buttons & Invitations area of the setup menu because these options will control how the button works on your site. That means the entire out of the box button configuration available from Salesforce.com is located here. If additional features are required for your particular button setup, you will need to customize the Chat Button code with APEX and VisualForce. For example if you would like to set the web page button for the chat initiation to also launch an external support page, this will need to be added into the chat button code by a developer.

4. Customize the Live Agent Configuration

In the last step we looked at all of the site visitor/ customer side of the Live Agent implementation. This part of the setup is where the internal company employee setup is customized. Everything your employees will be looking at from inside the service console will be controlled in this area. The same disclaimer about enhancements is true for this area of the setup as well. Since all the native out of the box configuration is located here it is important to review this carefully. If there is a feature you need to have that is not listed here, please inquire during your purchase consultation as it may require custom APEX in order to implement.

The Live Agent Configuration area entails the Basic Information, User and Profile Assignment, Supervisor Settings, and Chat Transfer Settings.

Basic Information is where custom agent names, auto away, critical wait time (seconds), sneak peek and notifications are specified.

Determine what users are assigned for this configuration, you can set the employees who will have this configuration applied to them by user or by profile:

Next, you can set the chat supervisor settings, a chat supervisor has an additional set of privileges in order to monitor and assist with the other agent’s ongoing chat. For example, a Supervisor can look at an ongoing chat and send a ‘whisper message’ to the agent that is not customer visible. For example, a supervisor may ‘whisper’ to an agent in order to offer advice or assistance. Set the Supervisor and Chat Transfer Settings:

5. Configure your Deployments

Deployment settings will allow you to specify branding, permitted Domains and set permission for visitors to save the chat transcript. The Deployment code that will be used on your webpage is located here upon Saving.

Upon clicking Save, the following deployment code will generate on the Deployment detail page. You can take the code and paste it into your web page.

This is the end of the basic setup. Once your button is live you can test it out by first logging into your Salesforce and navigating to the service console. Be sure you are set to active in order to get an incoming chat. Once the chat has ended look for the Chat Transcript in your Salesforce. This is where the details of each chat are stored. The Chat Transcripts are customizable and may be summarized in Salesforce reports.

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Winter 15 Release Notes Now Available

The Winter 15 Release Notes and Promotional Materials are now available!

Some of the big exciting new features coming include:

• SalesForce1 Mobile Action Bar
• Ability to Convert Leads on SalesForce1
• Preventing Duplicates on SalesForce1 and Sales/Service Clouds when entering records
• Viewing System Status in the SalesForceA app
• Custom lookup field on activities (Beta)

A long time coming, you can now create Lookup custom fields on Activities! This is a beta release, but still available on all editions. With this option, you can now create lookups for tasks and events to other objects, without the restriction of having to only use the Who and What standard fields.

Cheers...

System.LimitException: Too many SOQL queries: 101 – while moving into production

This exception is one of the common governor limits that a salesforce developer experiences. Generally we would get this exception when the code is not written properly . ie. You have a SOQL query with in a for loop.

But many a times while deploying a trigger or class to production i get ths error. I check and double check if there were any SOQL queries within a for loop. But nothing in the class or trigger has the SOQL with in a loop and this is reflected in a different test class other than the code you are moving into production.

This happens because we would not have used the Test.startTest() and Test.stopTest() methods in our test classes. All the DML operations for setting the data for execution of test should be done before the Test.startTest() method and all the actions for testing your code should be between Test.startTest() and Test.stopTest() methods.

What this does is that it gives context to your test class. In other words only the code executed between the Test.startTest() and Test.stopTest() would be considered in the governor limit calculations. If there are no Test.startTest() and Test.stopTest() then all the setup code and actual test code would count towards the limits.