This guide is meant to inform you on how to transition from legacy chat to Messenger. We want to make sure you have a seamless experience turning your legacy chat widget off, and making sure you have all of the tools you need to ensure that Messenger works for your use case.

In order to make the switch from Legacy Chat to Messenger, you will need to turn off Legacy Chat and create a new Messenger to take it’s place.

Turning Legacy Chat Off

If you have Legacy Chat enabled on your Help Center with the toggle below, then turning on the Enable Messenger on your Help Center toggle in the Messenger v2 admin will override your legacy chat toggle and display the new messenger instead.

Legacy Chat Setting

Messenger Setting

If you have Legacy Chat embedded on an external website via the code snippet, then you will need to manually remove it from the >head< section of your website and replace it with the new code snippet for Messenger v2. The new code snippet is preconfigured with the details of your instance so no matter where you deploy it, your users will be able to communicate with your helpdesk. Just like in Legacy Chat, you can also add an extra level of security by defining trusted domains.

Legacy Chat Setting

Messenger Setting

💡 Alternatively, if you do not wish to remove the Legacy Chat code snippet from your website, you can disable the Legacy Messenger toggle which will turn it off, though we do not recommend having both code snippets on your site.

Legacy Chat Setting

The following legacy chat settings will not be carried over into Messenger. This is either because the implementation of the feature will be handled differently in Messenger, or it is an artifact of Deskpro v5 and will be deprecated in the future.

Chat Labels

In Legacy Chat, Labels are used by agents to organize chats and make it easier to search for matching content in the Helpdesk.

Given Labels are a ticket concept, meaning it is a property assigned to a ticket rather than the conversation itself, an agent can add labels directly to tickets created via Messenger in the ticket view. As with other channels, you will then be able to organize and search for tickets that have that label attached to them.

Legacy Chat Setting

Chat Fields

In Legacy Chat, Chat Fields are an easy way to add extra information to tickets. Fields can be configured as a pre-chat form that requires users to populate information before a chat is created into a ticket.

In Messenger, we are introducing Chatflows, which provide you with a refreshed method of gathering additional information from a user. In Legacy Chat, filling in pre-chat forms felt archaic and lacked any personal touch. With Chatflows, you can configure nodes which act as Chat Fields, and allows a chatbot to ask a user to submit additional information with a conversational approach.

The information provided by the user to the chatbot can be mapped in 3 places, of your choosing:

1. The ticket conversation view - agent can see the information submitted by the user in the chatflow conversation history, before the ticket is handled by an agent.

2. Ticket properties (Coming Soon) - an admin can set user input nodes to map information submitted by a user directly to ticket properties, akin to Chat Fields.

3. User properties (Coming Soon) - an admin can set whether specific information submitted by a user should be mapped to the user’s profile. The information in these fields would then reflect in the user’s CRM profile.

Legacy Chat Setting

Messenger Setting

Queues

Queues in Legacy Chat are being replaced with a new feature called Routing.

With Routing, you will be able to create routing models that you want your Messenger tickets to be routed through. The routing model you configure can then be assigned to a Pass to Agent node in Chatflows and when a user reaches that node, they will be routed accordingly.

Much like Queues in Legacy Chat, Routing allows you to use 4 different models to assign Messenger tickets. Those are:

1. Round Robin

2. Round Robin with Optional Assignment

3. Least Utilized

4. Simulring

(Coming Soon) Rather than manually selecting agents individually that you want to include in a routing model, you can now assign routing models to teams, permission groups, and shifts. By assigning via these groups, it will be easier to bulk add agents to specific models.

Legacy Chat Setting

Messenger Setting

Departments

In Legacy Chat, admins can assign agents to departments with a feature called Departments. When an agent is then selected as the recipient of a ticket by a routing model, the agent coincides with is set as the department in the ticket properties.

Given Departments are a ticket concept, meaning it is a property assigned to a ticket rather than the conversation itself, an admin no longer needs to directly assign agents to departments. Setting the Department you want to be added to the ticket properties is handled in Chatflows. When configuring which agents you want a chatbot to pass the conversation to when a user reaches a Pass to Agent node, you can also select the Department. For example, if you have a routing model assigned to the Support Team, you can select that model in the Pass to Agent node, and set the department to Support so it reflects in the ticket properties as soon as an agent picks it up.

Here is an example chatflow where an end user can choose to speak to Support or Sales and then be routed to the appropriate team:

Legacy Chat Setting

Messenger Setting

Maximum Simultaneous Chats (found in Queue Settings):

Given that Legacy Chat has a defined start and end to a conversation and requires both parties to be present at the same time, Maximum Simultaneous Chats is used to alleviate overburdening agents with too many live chat conversations at the same time.

As Messenger is an asynchronous chat service, meaning that it is not dependent on both parties being present at the same time, we no longer support Maximum Simultaneous Chats. We will look to re-intropduce this concept in the near future.