Chat Window
The Chat Window is the customer-side interface of a legacy Salesforce Chat conversation: the panel that opened when a website visitor clicked the embedded Chat button or accepted a proactive invitation.
Definition
The Chat Window is the customer-side interface of a legacy Salesforce Chat conversation: the panel that opened when a website visitor clicked the embedded Chat button or accepted a proactive invitation. The window showed the running transcript, a typing area for the visitor's messages, agent branding such as logo and name, typing indicators, and any files or links the agent shared. Its look, behaviour, and pre-chat fields were configured through an Embedded Service deployment, and it inherited styling from the host site.
This window is now legacy. Salesforce retired Chat, also marketed as Live Agent, on February 14, 2026, and the embedded Chat Window retired with it. New deployments use enhanced Chat, formerly called Messaging for In-App and Web, whose messaging window keeps conversation history and supports asynchronous, cross-device chats. If you still run the old window, treat this entry as historical context and plan a move to enhanced Chat.
How the legacy Chat Window worked and what replaced it
What the Chat Window actually was
The Chat Window was not a standalone product. It was the visible front end of Salesforce Chat, the real-time web chat channel that routed visitor conversations to service agents through Omni-Channel. When a visitor opened the window, a small JavaScript snippet on the page loaded the chat experience, requested an available agent, and rendered the conversation in a floating panel. Everything the visitor saw lived in that panel: the greeting, the message thread, the input box, and the agent's name or photo. Admins did not edit the window directly. They configured an Embedded Service deployment in Setup, set branding and pre-chat fields there, and the deployment generated the snippet that produced the window on the site. The same snippet could sit on many pages, so the window appeared consistently across a domain. Because the window was generated rather than hand-built, two sites running the same deployment looked identical unless a developer added custom CSS. This tight coupling between deployment configuration and rendered window is the single most important thing to understand about how legacy Chat presented itself to customers, and it explains why so much window tuning happened in Setup rather than in page markup.
The pre-chat form that opened first
Most legacy Chat Windows did not drop the visitor straight into a conversation. They opened a pre-chat form first. The form collected a few details such as name, email, and the topic of the question. That data did real work. It routed the chat to an agent with the right skill, attached the visitor to an existing Contact or Case when a match was found, and gave the agent context before the first reply. Admins built the form from the Embedded Service deployment, and developers could extend it with Lightning Web Components or pass values in automatically for logged-in users. Direct-to-button and direct-to-agent routing let high-intent pages skip straight to the right queue. The practical rule was to keep the form short. Three or four fields was the common ceiling, because every extra field gave the visitor another reason to close the window before talking to anyone. Heavy forms were one of the most common reasons a chat program underperformed, and trimming them was usually the fastest conversion win an admin could ship without touching code.
Branding, styling, and mobile behaviour
The Chat Window inherited its identity from the Embedded Service deployment. Brand colours, header text, logo, and agent imagery were all set there, and the default templates were built to render cleanly on phones as well as desktops. Teams that wanted more control layered custom CSS on top of the generated window to match fonts and spacing exactly. This is where two recurring defects appeared. The first was a branding mismatch, where the window looked like a bolted-on third-party tool instead of part of the site, which quietly eroded visitor trust. The second was broken mobile layout, almost always caused by custom CSS that overrode the responsive defaults and was never tested on a real handset. Because a large share of support chats came from phones, a window that broke on mobile locked out a big cohort of customers. The fix for both was the same discipline: change styling deliberately, then test on actual devices rather than only in a desktop browser shrunk down to phone width. A staging site with the deployment installed made it safe to preview those changes before they reached real visitors.
Bots and Agentforce in front of the window
The Chat Window did not care whether a human or a bot was on the other side. When Einstein Bots, and later Agentforce, fronted the channel, the visitor saw the same panel, the same typing indicators, and the same branding. The bot answered first, handled routine questions, and escalated to a live agent only when it needed to. To the visitor the handoff was usually invisible, which was the point. A well-built bot deflected common questions inside the same window the customer already trusted, and a person stepped in for anything the bot could not resolve. This pattern let teams scale chat coverage without staffing every conversation, and it kept agents focused on the cases that genuinely needed a person. It also meant the window had to render structured bot replies cleanly, such as quick-reply buttons and menus, so admins testing a bot needed to confirm those elements displayed correctly in the live window and not just in the bot builder preview.
Why Salesforce retired it
Legacy Chat was synchronous and session-bound. If the visitor closed the tab or lost connection, the conversation ended and the transcript did not follow them back. That model fit an older web, but it clashed with how people now expect to message a business. Salesforce retired Chat, including the embedded Chat Window, on February 14, 2026. In the run-up to that date the product stopped receiving new features, though Salesforce continued shipping critical trust and security updates until retirement. The retirement covered the whole legacy family, marketed over the years as Live Agent, Salesforce Chat, Embedded Chat, and Service Chat. The replacement is enhanced Chat, originally released as Messaging for In-App and Web, built on Hyperforce. Its messaging window keeps the conversation history in view across visits, lets the customer and agent pause and resume, and works across tabs and devices without dropping the thread. In short, the experience moved from a transient chat session to a persistent, asynchronous conversation that behaves much more like the consumer messaging apps customers already use every day.
Migrating off the legacy window
If you still serve the legacy Chat Window, the path forward is enhanced Chat. Salesforce shipped a migration tool, reachable in Setup, that helps move an existing legacy web chat setup toward the new messaging deployment. The work is more than a like-for-like swap. The enhanced messaging window is configured through its own Embedded Service deployment, has its own pre-chat and branding options, and routes through Messaging sessions rather than the old chat transcripts. Reporting changes too, since enhanced Chat records conversations differently from legacy Chat, so dashboards built on the old objects need rebuilding. Plan for three things: reconfigure the customer-facing window and pre-chat, retrain agents on the asynchronous model where a conversation can sit idle and resume later, and migrate or rebuild your chat reports. Teams that treated the move as a small CSS change tended to stall. Teams that scoped it as a channel re-platform, with testing on real devices, came out with a better customer experience than the legacy window ever offered. Start early, because the retirement date has already passed and unmigrated deployments no longer have a supported chat channel.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Chat with Customers on Your WebsiteSalesforce
- Replace Legacy Chat with Enhanced ChatSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Chat Window.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Chat Window.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. When a website visitor accepts a proactive prompt, what opens as the Chat Window?
Q2. Which design choice in a Chat Window pre-chat form tends to lift conversion the most?
Q3. Why does a Chat Window failing on phones leave a measurable revenue gap?
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