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Migrate from Legacy Live Agent to Omni-Channel for Chat
Are you loving Chat and want to add Omni-Channel to the mix? Here’s what changes for you and your organization (and not for your agents!).
Required Editions
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Legacy Chat will be retired on February 14, 2026. To avoid service interruptions to your end users, switch to enhanced Chat (formerly Messaging for In-App and Web). Enhanced Chat offers many of the legacy Chat features that you love plus asynchronous conversations that can be picked back up at any time. Learn about migrating in Help and Trailhead.
So, you’ve decided to take your customer service to the next level by using Chat and Omni-Channel in tandem. That’s great! Once everything’s set up, you’ll find that the two work together in perfect harmony.
Chat is powered by Chat Configurations, which control the behaviors and settings that are available to Chat users. Similarly, Omni-Channel uses Presence Configurations to control the behaviors and settings that are available to Omni-Channel users. You can integrate Chat with Omni-Channel so chats are routed just like other work items, and you can even use Omni-Channel routing for your chats. Whichever way you use Omni-Channel with Chat, your agents are then able to accept or reject chat requests right from the Omni-Channel widget.
When you integrate Chat and Omni-Channel, your Chat users also become Omni-Channel users, so your chat agents must be associated with both a Chat Configuration and a Presence Configuration. Luckily, Salesforce does some of the heavy lifting for you when you enable Omni-Channel with your current Chat implementation.
For each Chat Configuration that you already have in your org, Salesforce:
- Creates a corresponding Presence Configuration for each of your Chat Configurations
- Sets the chat capacity for each Presence Configuration to what’s set in its corresponding Chat Configuration
- Assigns your chat agents to the new corresponding Presence Configurations
If you have Chat enabled but don’t have an implementation, when you enable Omni-Channel, Salesforce creates a Chat Service Channel.
Salesforce does all this automatically so there’s no disruption to your agents’ workflow. They can start accepting chats through Omni-Channel in the app. The only difference they see is that they now use Omni-Channel in the app to set their status and accept chat notifications. They may also see a change in their status options, as Omni-Channel presence statuses are configurable.
If you want to use Chat and Omni-Channel in Lightning Experience, you must use Omni-Channel routing for your chats. All you have to do is create a chat button with the routing type Omni-Channel and set up Skills-Based Routing Rules or assign your agents to queues. Then, add the Omni-Channel component and Live Chat Transcripts to your Lightning app, and your agents can start accepting chat requests.
- Compare Live Agent and Omni-Channel Routing for Chats
See the benefits and limitations of using Omni-Channel routing for chats or keeping Live Agent routing for chats. If you want to use Chat in Lightning Experience, you must use Omni-Channel routing. - Manage Chat Capacity with Omni-Channel
If your support organization has been using Chat for a while, you know that you can select an agent’s maximum number of chats by using the Chat Capacity field. When Omni-Channel is enabled in your Salesforce org, however, you need to manage your agent’s chat capacity using Omni-Channel configurations instead.
