Salesforce Chat translation user guide

The Language I/O Chat app for Salesforce allows monolingual support agents to chat with end users in over 100 languages from the same Salesforce agent console they normally work from. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Language I/O Chat app works, with examples including an English-speaking agent and a Spanish-speaking end user.

How it works

1. To start the conversation, the end user requests a chat from your language-specific support portal. 
2. Once the end user requests a chat, it automatically launches the chat window on their end that asks them to wait while they are connected with an agent. This message (provided by Salesforce) is in their language. For the purpose of clarity, here it is in English:
   
3. To see the incoming chat requests, the agent must set their status to "Online" from the bottom right-hand corner once in console mode:
   
4. The agent can then see the chat request and click on the "Accept" button to accept it:
   
5. Once the Language I/O Chat plugin is installed, there will be a “Translation” tab available on the agent’s interface. The agent can then use this tab when translation is required. Incoming and outgoing chats are translated automatically:
   
6. On the end user's side, the same conversation shows in Spanish:
   
   • Available actions: The end user can use the "Flag" if it is enabled to report translation quality issues.
7. When the end user replies in Spanish, the reply is automatically translated into English:
   
   • Available actions: the agent can click on "Redetect" if the language was not detected correctly,  "Retranslate" to try another translation engine, or "Show"  to see the original message untranslated.
8. The English-speaking agent can thus chat seamlessly with non-English-speaking end users. End users only see the translations.
9. Once either the end user or agent ends the chat session, both the Spanish and English chats are saved as a standard Salesforce transcript. To see the transcript, go to Chat Transcripts from the upper-right-hand menu in console mode:
   
10. Find the transcript associated with your session and open it as you normally would. Below the standard chat transcript, you can see the translated version of the transcript, with both English and Spanish. If you manage a group of agents and speak only English, you can understand what was said during the session as well:
    

Using autoresponders

Agents can set auto-responders to trigger at the beginning of the session in the end user's language. An auto-responder is a pre-made message that greets the end user. Language I/O recommends that you let end users know that the chat is being machine translated. This way, they know that they are communicating with a human and may be more forgiving of potential mistakes.

Alternatively, if translation is disabled by default and agents can choose whether to enable translation, you can set up two separate auto responders, one to send a greeting when the session starts, and a disclaimer about machine translation that is sent when translation is enabled.

Here is an example of how an end user and agent would see the same auto-responder, side-by-side:

To enable auto responders, see Enabling Auto-responders in Salesforce Chat.