Replace Legacy Chat with Enhanced Chat

The Conversation Is Now Asynchronous and Persistent

Legacy Chat was session-based, which meant that conversations ended when your customer closed the conversation window or lost connection with a service rep. Enhanced Chat conversation history remains in the window beyond a single interaction. With Enhanced Chat, service reps and customers can start and stop the conversation, then pick it back up at a later time. Customers can also message across tabs and devices without disconnecting the conversation.

If you prefer to stick with the synchronous workflow you used in chat, review Create a Synchronous Messaging Experience in Enhanced Chat.

Enhanced Chat Is Part of the New Conversation Platform

Enhanced Chat is one of many channels built on our new conversation platform. The conversation platform also houses Salesforce Voice, Enhanced Messaging channels such as WhatsApp, and Partner Messaging Channels. This shared platform has several benefits.

• When we roll out a new feature, it’s often shared across all channels on the conversation platform. Service reps get a consistent experience, regardless of channel.
• We built these channels to scale beyond the customer support use case. For example, we built business-initiated outbound messaging with lead generation for sales teams in mind.

The Legacy Chat Features That You Love Are Now in Enhanced Chat

Enhanced Chat offers the same features that you enjoyed in Legacy Chat, plus some key improvements:

• Asynchronous and persistent conversations can happen across devices and be picked back up at any time.
• An API lets you delete data.
• Individual-Object Linking (which replaced Channel-Object Linking by moving the functionality to flows) offers a flow template for messaging sessions.
• Admins can create a library of messaging components that service reps use to send structured content to customers in messaging sessions. Components can include links, questions with options, secure forms, and time selectors.
• Conversation intelligence rules automatically notify supervisors or service reps in real time when a customer uses a flagged keyword in a messaging session.
• Omni-Channel flow-based routing provides more flexibility, such as routing directly to a service rep.
• Route conversations to and from enhanced bots that allow rich text and attachments.
• Business Hours let you hide the messaging window when your service reps aren’t working.
• Customers see an Estimated Wait Time letting them know how long before they’re connected to a service rep.
• Customers see auto-responses letting them know when a conversation starts or ends, when a service rep has joined, and more.
• Customers can see read and delivery receipts.
• Service reps can send outbound file attachments.
• Customers can send emoji.
• Customers can search messaging history.
• Enhanced Chat for Web can be added to Build Your Own (LWR) and Microsite (LWR) Experience Site templates, and to B2B and B2B2C Commerce templates.
• Enhanced Chat for In-App can send push notifications to customers.

Enhanced Chat Includes AI Agent Support

Enhanced Chat is compatible with both AI agents, such as Agentforce Service Agent, and enhanced bots, so you can incorporate them into your support strategy to let your support reps focus on more complex inquiries. Legacy Chat supports standard bots only, and can't be used with AI agents. If you're migrating from Legacy Chat, you can clone your standard bots to turn them into enhanced bots.

The Setup Experience Changed to Ensure Better Results

We offer a Chat Transition Readiness Report to understand the complexity of your current chat setup and plan a smooth transition. This report highlights active deployments, configurations, and customizations, making it easier to assess the scale of your chat environment as you prepare for the transition.

We offer a Legacy Web Chat Migration (Beta) tool to quickly migrate to Enhanced Chat for Web. Learn more.

Enhanced Chat for In-App is an SDK that requires manual configuration. To add Enhanced Chat for In-App to your mobile app:

• Similar to chat, configure an SDK to communicate with your Enhanced In-App Chat deployment. Install it with Gradle for Android. Install it with Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, or manually for iOS.
• Enhanced Chat for In-App provides two production-quality layers of SDKs for each platform: A UI SDK that offers a ready-made but configurable UI and a Core App SDK that you can use to create your own UI from scratch. Chat’s Embedded Service SDK only offers a ready-made UI or some lower-level APIs for building your own UI.
• Similar to Chat’s Embedded Service SDK, the Enhanced Chat for In-App SDK requires you to create a configuration object to start a conversation. These objects have a different syntax, but the concept is the same. However, with Enhanced Chat for In-App, you can download a configuration file directly from your deployment in Setup and supply that file as the configuration information. You can still manually specify configuration values.
• Sending and receiving messages and the other elements of a chat conversation require you to use a different API than previously.

Important Migrating to Enhanced Chat requires Lightning Experience. If you're still using Salesforce Classic, now's the time to get started with Lightning Experience.

Learn More