Messaging and Live Chat Release Notes: April 2022

Product enhancements

•  Guide Bot Images: Added the ability to render an image alongside the bot prompt during bot configuration.
•  Guide Bot: Added the ability to save progress during bot setup/configuration without exiting the bot configuration screen in order to have a smoother and faster bot setup experience.
•  Guide Bot: Improved the bot configuration screen and added a minimized step view for better scalability. This enhancement is particularly useful for clients who have very complex bots with many steps. Now, users can easily expand or collapse individual bot steps and can also use a new “Expand All / Collapse All” button to determine how the bot configuration is displayed.
•  Guide Bot: Improved the “Transfer to widget” dropdown list by alphabetizing the results so that admins can more quickly locate the desired widget name.
•  Salesforce Integration: Upgraded Salesforce integration to use Version 54 which was released in Spring 2022 to ensure we remain compatible with the latest available version.
•  Supervisor: Added an enhancement to display the visitor’s phone number during SMS conversations.
•  Hub SDK: Improved the ability for the Hub SDK to handle transfer events (i.e. when an active conversation is transferred to another agent). The Hub SDK will now send all Hub SDK events up to the transfer event.
•  Hub SDK: Added the ability for admins to configure an Agent Link that is persistent in the agent Hub so that agents can view an iframed third-party application inside the Hub and extend the Chat Hub web application.
• Performed post-Objectify migration cleanup actions as part of the ongoing technical initiative to migrate to Java 11.

Bug fixes

•  Addressed a bug where clicking the Logs ‘Previous’ button incorrectly reverted the displayed logs to the most recent logs instead of displaying the logs for the selected time period.
•  Addressed a bug where the HubSpot integration’s third Update and Overwrite setting was not working properly.
•  Addressed a bug which sometimes caused an inability to properly save when using the Guide Bot “Qualification & Routing” bot template.
•  Addressed a bug where the agent Hub did not load completely for certain clients.

Messaging and Live Chat Release Notes: March 2022

Product enhancements

In March we officially launched Supervisor! Supervisor is a powerful real-time chat performance monitoring and agent management tool. With Supervisor, managers/supervisors can unobtrusively monitor active conversations across widgets, privately whisper suggestions to agents, and even take over a conversation if further escalation is needed.

Contact your Account Manager or Client Success Manager to learn more about the new Supervisor/Whisper feature and receive an in-depth demo.

•  Supervisor: Improved and unified the overall UI styling for different types of Sneak Peek messages to improve the user experience.
•  Supervisor: Added support for basic emojis.
•  Supervisor: Improved the logic that controls the yellow whisper icon which is displayed in the Logs’ new “Supervisor Whisper” column. Now, this indicator displays if the case contains a supervisor and/or an agent whisper.
•  Supervisor: Added the ability to collect Supervisor feedback directly inside the Hub so that users can quickly and easily submit actionable data and timely feedback to Messaging and Live Chat Product and UX team to inform future Supervisor enhancements and improvements.
•  Supervisor: Improved and updated the UI for JavaScript variables on the Visitor Details panel.

Bug fixes

•  Supervisor: Addressed a bug where the Supervisor whisper numerical indicator was not always displayed or displayed inconsistent date after a chat transfer.
•  Supervisor: Addressed a bug where sometimes the Supervisor view did not properly display all messages sent from the agent to the visitor.
•  Addressed a bug where the “Live chat transfer to…” text was not displayed properly in the Hub left side panel.
•  Addressed a bug where the Hub alert setting “Only New Chat and @ Mentions” did not work during chat transfers.
•  Addressed a bug where sub-admin permissions were not working correctly on some newly created widgets.
•  Addressed a bug where phone numbers were not always appearing during SMS-to-Chat for certain clients.
•  Addressed a bug where Auto Translate did not work properly for reactive chats using a pre-chat form.
•  Addressed a bug where some clients using the SAP integration were not properly receiving a copy of the conversation by email.
•  Addressed a bug where some users logging in with SSO (using Exclusive Login via SAML) were displaying incorrect last login dates.
•  Addressed a bug where Auto Translate did not always work with proactive messages.

Messaging and Live Chat Release Notes: February 2022

Product enhancements

•  Supervisor Beta: Added the ability for supervisors to label conversations in the Supervisor view, so that they can segment and disposition conversations and trigger downstream workflows.
•  Supervisor Beta: Added the ability for supervisors to pin/unpin a chat in the Supervisor Live Monitor for improved ease of use and to enable monitoring of the highest priority conversations.
•  Supervisor Beta: Enhanced the Hub tab/favicon indicators of a visitor message, so that supervisors (who are also set up as agents) will receive notifications for incoming visitor chats while they are in Supervisor mode. This enhancement ensures that supervisors can continue to provide excellent customer service and prevents missed chats.
•  Made various improvements to the Dark Theme UI.
•  Completed various tasks to support the ongoing migration to the latest Java 11 technologies.

Bug fixes

•  Supervisor Beta: Addressed a bug where the Supervisor “is watching” icon did not always accurately reflect which supervisor(s) are watching in real-time.
•  Supervisor Beta: Addressed a bug where supervisors were unable to view active conversations being handled by a bot.
•  Supervisor Beta: Addressed a UI bug where certain icons did not properly disappear from view while filtering chats.
•  Addressed a bug where some surveys appeared to have duplicate public IDs.
•  Addressed a bug where a Guide Bot which is set up to transfer to an API Bot failed to transfer due to an error.

Messaging and Live Chat Release Notes: January 2022

Product enhancements

•  Supervisor Beta: Updated handling of whisper messages for integrations, viewcase, and Logs API. This enhancement aims to make handling of whisper messages more consistent overall and ensures that internal-facing whisper messages are kept private (not accessible by website visitors) and secure. Additional details:
•  Whisper messages are not sent to any integrations (with the exception of the Integrations API).
•  The chat viewcase displays both agent and supervisor whisper messages only if the viewer has the proper permissions (is an admin or has Logs access), otherwise whisper messages are not shown here.
•  The Logs export contains both agent and supervisor whisper messages.
•  The chat visitor transcript request never contains whisper messages, as these are considered internal-facing messages only.
•  Supervisor Beta: Added the ability for administrators to enable or disable the Agent Whisper feature in the Admin Dashboard > Hub > Supervisor settings.
•  Hub Performance: Made various Hub performance improvements throughout the month of January to improve Hub load time, Hub processing/updating times while typing, and to reduce and prevent some sporadic Hub freezing behavior.

Bug fixes

•  Addressed a bug where the Hub text area did not expand properly while typing.
•  Addressed a bug where proactive chat did not always trigger properly on Sundays.
•  Addressed a bug where the Hub did not scroll to the bottom when a Sneak Peek message was received.

Messaging and Live Chat Release Notes: December 2021

Product enhancements

•  Supervisor Beta:Disabled the whisper input area for Recent chats.
•  Added the ability for users to scroll and view extra-long images in the chat window
•  Supervisor Beta: Added the ability for supervisors to claim/transfer a chat to themselves.
•  Supervisor Beta: Added whisper message count indicator to the agent Hub “Live” view column to make it easier for agents to see when a supervisor has sent a whisper message to them.
•  Supervisor Beta: Added the ability for agents to toggle between “Whisper” and “Reply” mode.
•  Added the ability to use the Provisioning API to set hours of operation for a widget.

Bug fixes

•  Supervisor Beta: Addressed a bug experienced by Supervisor Early Access participants where the whisper functionality did not function properly during specific conversations.
•  Integrations: Addressed a bug where the HubSpot custom mapping was not sending data properly.

Release Notes November 15: Visitor Verification for Bot API, New Coversation API Events, Logs page update and other improvements

Hello everyone,

here are some updates the developer team has shipped to the chat product in the recent weeks:

Bot API:

We now support visitor identity verification (HMAC) with the Bot API. For more details you can check the Bot API documentation here.

Conversation Events API

We have added additional events to the conversation event API. You can now track these events:

                      1. Conversation Responded
                      2. Conversation Closed
                      3. Conversation Queued
                      4. Conversation Assigned
                      5. Conversation Broadcasted
                      6. Conversation Labeled
                      7. Conversation Transferred
                      8. Conversation Visitor Survey Added

For more details please refer to the developer documentation here

Visitor Chat

We have added an alt-tag to the agent avatar image to improve accessibility and ADA compliance of the visitor chat.

Contacts and Integrations / Custom Mapping:

* Chat agents can now save the visitors name with the “/name = Jon Doe” command in Hub without requiring an email. Previously the email was required to create and save a contact in SnapEngage.

*  The visitors phone number captured automatically captured from the call-me feature is now available in the SnapEngage Phone number field and in the case logs under the visitor phone number field. It is no longer automatically stored as a Label.

Logs Page

* We have updated the Logs page to show the visitor browser and platform information as icons in a single column instead of two. The detailed information is still available on hover and in the CSV exports.

Resolved Issues

* Fixed an issue where the Guide Bot did not assign the configured Label in the first step, when this was configured as a proactive chat prompt.

* Hub navigation slowness/performance issues: We have fixed an issue where chats transferred from a guide bot or approval checker caused some slowness in Hub when opening the chat. If you still experience performance issues with Hub please let us know!

* SSO / Okta: Fixed an issue where the Single Sign On option did not work when exclusive login was enabled

* Fixed an issue where the wrong agent alias appeared in the Logs after a reassignment.

* Autotranslate: Fixed an issue where conversations in the Recent Chats section were not displayed with translations

* Continuous Conversations: Fixed an issue where the continuous conversation system message did not show to the agent after a transfer.

* Proactive Chat: Fixed an issue where the rule did not trigger when accessing a single page app URL after navigating there.

 

 

Release Notes August 30: New “Number of times to show” Proactive Rule Feature

Hello SnapEngagers,

we have released a great new feature to enhance our Proactive Chat capabilities.

You can now set up the chat to engage the visitor a specific number of times in a given time frame. With this new rule you get

– More control over your proactive messages, with better than ever ability to precisely target your visitors with just the right messaging.

– Gain more control over how often a message is displayed to a given visitor to avoid spamming or annoying your visitors.

– The ability to run period surveys and announcements (for example monthly news, etc).

The rule can be set to only count if the visitor has responded to the chat.

 

For more information please visit our proactive rule help documentation here

How Unified Chat Banishes Customer Frustration

Remember the supposed “good old days” when your customers dialed your toll-free number, explained their problem to someone on your help desk staff, and went away happy, or happy-ish?

The system wasn’t perfect. It also wasn’t the obstacle course it is now – for customers and businesses alike.

Your Frustrated Customer 

In the name of efficiency, and naturally only with the best of intentions, you’ve succeeded in turning customers’ remote interaction attempts into Odyssean quests of heroic proportions. 

Live chat platforms, SMS texting, social media, and mobile apps with integrated feedback features have sped up response times and automated answers to customers’ routine questions. But the reality is that in the digital era, the customer who’s looking to resolve a more complex issue – or two issues at once – is going to have a hard time of it. 

It’s no wonder 53% of customers abandon their online purchases

But what about your faithful customer who’s trying to resolve a support issue, and also has a question about a new product? They have no idea your help desk and your CRM don’t talk to each other. All they know is that their experience is anything but seamless, and absolutely frustrating. Forced to repeat account numbers and other information to multiple people or platforms, while being passed from pillar to post, is simply enraging.

For you, the increased churn that results from poor customer experience is just the tip of the iceberg. Because chat is just one element in a multi-layered ecosystem that requires you to handle different types of customer interactions with separate tools and strategies, you have a bunch of other problems too. 

A disjointed approach ends up creating a poor customer experience that degrades customer satisfaction and increases churn

 

Why It’s Time to Evolve to Unified Chat

For better or worse, today, real-time messaging and conversational tools such as live chat, SMS, chatbots, and social media are now the dominant channels for customer experience management. Alongside the risk of negative customer experiences, the following are some of the challenges arising from the fact that these channels are not integrated, and each requires a separately managed platform:

  • Incomplete information: Without synergies between systems, the flow of data and customer feedback is impeded. This means leaders are unable to gain an accurate picture of the health of their business and make informed decisions around improvements in sales productivity and customer support.
  • Difficulty scaling customer support, sales, and marketing functions: Configuring multiple platforms and tying their back-end systems together requires hefty integration and data aggregation efforts. These are costly and resource intensive. 
  • Bloated costs, redundant services: Where sales and support teams both need to use the CRM’s chat option and the helpdesk’s chat option, the company must purchase not two, but four sets of digital engagement licenses. Then, since the platforms work in isolation, the company will also pay redundant chat deflection fees for every conversation not handled by a human. 

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Snapshot of SFDC Licenses and Fees*

Enterprise license per user/month

Chat access per user/month

Plus cost per 100 bot conversations per month

Challenges notwithstanding, and despite legitimate worries about how the customer experience may be impacted, the fact remains that 80% of businesses using AI-powered tools such as chatbots have seen measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, service delivery, and contact center performance. 

Chat is here to stay.

As the technology evolves to meet business needs more effectively, connected chat software leads the way.

Closing the Loop with Unified Chat

A unified chat solution can truly connect customer engagement for both your internal and external teams. Intelligent, advanced routing gets the customer to the right team and resource the first time and data flows effortlessly between platforms, creating full visibility and transparency and delivering valuable insights. 

Not only can you view the customer experience and feedback in real time and on a role-by-role basis, such as by a sales or support agent, when the chat is transferred to another team or agent, all the associated metrics remain on the correct sub-account.

Unified chat also incorporates AI and natural language processing, enabling chatbots to learn over time with each interaction and dramatically increasing your organization’s ability to solve complex issues through automation – in addition to the human interaction customers still expect. AI-powered agent assistance can even use chat histories and insights to help coach human sales agents and improve their close rates and overall performance.

The right solution will also allow for a wide range of APIs, integrations, and content lookups, as well as meeting security and compliance standards, including:

  • Third-party IDP SSO
  • GDPR
  • The California Data Privacy Act
  • HIPAA
  • PCI

SnapEngage: Better Experiences for the Customer, Better Outcomes for Your Enterprise

SnapEngage offers a connected solution which enables you to elevate the customer experience and gain competitive ground for your organization at the same time.

Download the eBook to learn how SnapEngage breaks down the knowledge barriers between teams to meet customer needs in the moment and empowers businesses to make process, technology, and revenue-generating improvements – all with less cost and effort.

Using SnapEngage to unify the customer experience can result in:

%

increase in leads

%

year-over-year growth in chat volumes

%

increase in chat to completed sales

%

conversion rate from chat to sales quotes

Download our “Unifying the Chat Experience” eBook to learn how SnapEngage breaks down the knowledge barriers between teams to meet customer needs in the moment and empowers businesses to make process, technology, and revenue-generating improvements — all with less cost and effort.

How to Unify your Customer Experience

The value of seamless customer engagement from initial contact to final sale – and beyond

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It’s time to evolve chat

Modern chat isn’t only one tool, it’s an integral aspect of a complex communicative ecosystem. Today’s business ecosystem demands organizations to properly address all kinds of customer interactions with non-integrated, specialized tools and strategies. When companies approach the digital space in a way both disjointed and separate, they create a negative experience for customers that erodes satisfaction and balloons churn. A unified customer experience is missing.

In today’s world, online communication isn’t simply a bonus, it’s mandatory. Many businesses annually spend millions attempting to dislodge internal silos and improve all facets of conversation and collaboration. That said, many of these companies also build and buy disjunct and unintegrated technology stacks, further making those exact same silos in the first place. To be competitive in the digital space, it’s mandatory to unify the customer experience and adapt a unified live chat solution.


%

84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report a causal increase in revenue.

%

70% of consumers prefer messaging support over calling in by phone.

%

53% of customers are likely to abandon their online purchases if lacking quick answers to their questions.

Messy systems drive bad customer experience and churn

Brands need to be able to instantly route questions and information between teams and customers. Imagine a current customer of yours asking about a new product, but they also have an issue for your support team. To handle this scenario, the right question has to get to the right expert — whether bot or human — the very first time.

Undertaking a project to digitally transform and unify the customer experience and unify chat is increasingly necessary, but it doesn’t come without risk.

Implement a chat solution designed for a better customer experience

To fully realize the capabilities of chat tools and avoid the gradual eroding of the customer experience, companies must adopt a chat solution that is acutely designed to unify the customer experience.

Why chat needs to be unified

Although once a game changer, the chat solutions of yesterday can no longer meet the requirements of today’s dynamic and hyper-competitive business ecosystem.

Cut exorbitant costs

Most CRMs and Help Desks command multiple, stacking fees. Everything from dual-licensing fees to chat deflection fees balloon costs and drive inefficiency. A unified chat solution connects your team cost-effectively and eliminates these exorbitant costs for redundant services.

Intelligent routing connects your teams and your customers

A connected chat solution unifies customer engagement across all of your company’s touch points, both externally and internally. Intelligent routing directs your customers to the right team, agent, or resource the very first time – no redirection and no cumbersome transfers.

%

93% of customers are likely to become repeat customers at businesses that provide exceptional customer experiences

Modernize your customer communications with unified live chat

Today’s environment of heightened customer expectations demands implementation of a communication strategy that creates a truly unified customer experience. Provide your customers with a refreshingly simple and delightful journey by deconstructing silos and the barriers between disjunct systems. The best point of integration is at the customer experience level. A unified chat journey focuses first on the customer, and ensures the business as a whole flourishes. 

Want to continue reading?

How to Leverage Your Live Chat Data

live chat data

Live chat data tells the story of your success and sets a roadmap for the future. It can also unveil pain-points in your product that were hidden or obscured. Collecting live chat data is easy, collecting the right data and knowing what to do with it – that’s not so easy. In this article we will discuss how to collect the right data and understand and serve your clients better.

 

Collecting the right live chat data

It’s often difficult to know what information is most beneficial to your organization. Generally, the industry standard KPIs for customer support are client satisfaction, wait time, and time to resolution. 

Going beyond that, the choices you make about collecting data are largely shaped by what exactly you are setting out to accomplish. 

  • Use labels to identify pain-points in your products and services, and categorize support requests by product line or feature-set. 
  • Improve your documentation and self-serve help center by tracking the types of requests you are receiving so you can identify knowledge gaps in your client base. 
  • Develop a client-informed product roadmap by simplifying the process to share product feedback.

All of this live chat data, and more, can be collected easily and efficiently by your agents in SnapEngage using Labels

 

You’ve collected it – now what?

TeamSupport provides robust data reporting capabilities designed for you to segment and process your data with minimal time and effort. Relevant information is always quick to find. Our out-of-the-box TeamSupport integration allows you to send relevant data with “set it and forget it” simplicity. If you are using custom labels, as discussed above, you will need to first create matching custom fields in TeamSupport and then map the labels in SnapEngage to the fields in TeamSupport via the integration in SnapEngage.

 

Finding the narrative in TeamSupport

Now your team is collecting data in their chats, and that live chat data is flowing smoothly into TeamSupport through your integration. TeamSupport boasts a robust capability for report creation – you’ll want to read this to develop a firm grasp on the matter – but here are a few good places to get your feet wet. 

Time period matters

Consider the time range when creating reports: 

Weekly reports allow for a quick assessment of how things are going, like CSAT or response time 

Monthly and quarterly reports are better for identifying trends and evaluating long term strategies.

Start visual

Tables of data are important, but first, creating a chart to be able to quickly visualize your data is critical. Start with “Request Type” and set the time period to quarter to date. A report like this can help you evaluate how to more efficiently help your clients. Do you have a lot of “How To” requests? Then it is a good bet that your Help Center can be improved to decrease time to resolution, increase ticket deflection, and drive client satisfaction while simultaneously lowering the demand on your support staff. Lots of technical Issues? Maybe there is a need to revise your organization’s quality assurance strategy.

Deep analysis

Mirror your visualizations with “Ticket View.” Now that you know what your clients are asking for on a larger scale, you will want to further segment and understand this data so you can develop an effective, data informed strategy. 

For example, create a ticket view of all of your “How To” tickets, be sure to turn on Request Topic and sort your table by that column. Now you can see all the requests that come in for each topic. Notice any trends? Are multiple clients asking the same question about the same feature? Create a help article to answer it – clients want to solve problems themselves. In fact, a report by Aspect Software indicates 73% of customers want to solve product or service issues on their own.

Identifying trends in customer requests allows you to increase customer satisfaction and brand trust by giving you the data needed to improve self-serve resources, which can free up your agents to address the more unique and challenging issues your clients face. Additionally, this data can allow you and your product team to identify pain-points and areas of friction in the product which can inform road-map decisions.

 

live chat data

 

Understanding Your Data Narrative with SnapEngage’s TeamSupport Integration

Ultimately, the data you collect, the story it tells, and how you react, depends on your organization and your goals. The strategy outlined here is a common one for many, but maybe not for you. The exciting news is that we’ve only just scratched the surface. To dig in further, reach out to SnapEngage Support for further questions and answers.

Additionally, we offer a free 15 minute integration strategy session to help get you up and running.

 

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