Using Live Agent Chat, Sales Representatives can chat with their customers and solve their problems or answer their questions. In today’s world providing first class services to customers is very important and chat support plays an important role here. Live Agent Chats are referred as Live Chat as well. With Live Chat, customers don’t need to wait for the long queue or need to wait for replies for their email queries. They can get immediate attention which eventually improves customer satisfactions.

Trailhead comes up with a very good project “Build a Branded Chat” which explains how to enable Live Chat and it’s basic configurations. I recommend everyone to please go through this one and understand the basic of the Live Agent Chat first before proceeding further.

Below is the visual representation of “Live Agent” Object Model. Though I am saying it “Object Model”, but most of them are not objects. 🙂 



Let’s try to two basic terminologies associated with Live Agent.
1. Skill:

To understand Skills, we first need to understand how we want to support our customers – is it based on geography? Is it based on business units? Is it based on products? etc.. Then based on the answers you will hire employees and train them so that they can support your customers. These peoples are known as Sales Representatives who normally support your customers.

So let’s say, the company “Global XYZ” is having business all over the world. They are supporting their customers based on geographies. So for them, they will create skills like – APAC, NA, EUROPE, EMEA.

Again let’s say the company “Global Insurance MNOP” is selling Insurance Products. So for them, the skills will be – Health Insurance, Car Insurance, House Insurance.

Now you will assign your Sales Representatives(Salesforce Users) to the Skills. It’s a many to many relationships i.e. one skill can have multiple Sales Representatives(Salesforce Users) and one Representative(Salesforce User) can have multiple skills. 

2. Deployment:

A deployment is basically the section where you will place all your configurations to control Live Agent behaviors in your website. Deployments will provide JavaScript codes which you will put in your Web pages.

You can have more than one Live Agent deployments. In case your organization has one Service console supporting multiple sites, you can create Live Agent deployments per site.



Trailhead comes up with an image which I really like and it explains the two pillars so clearly.

Trailhead Modules: