In 2007, a small team of 4 engineers set out to build the most innovative live chat product in the world. What technology did we turn to? Adobe Flash. More accurately it was Adobe Flex, which ran in the Adobe Air runtime.
Adobe Flash has been relegated to the annals of history, though Activa Live Chat lives on in this single screenshot that I’ve been moving from laptop to laptop for more than 10 years:
It’s not that stunning compared to modern design standards, but it was ahead of its time in 2008.
We had a ton of innovative features, delightful animations, efficient workflow boosting shortcuts, and a plug and play platform called Chatlets (a name that 3 of the 4 founders claim to have come up with) that enabled developers to add custom integrations.
The Sneak Peek feature really shined during demos. Questionable in terms of modern privacy standards, Sneak Peek allowed agents to see what users were typing before they hit send. This would enable lighting quick servicing of chats as you could find a help article before the user ever even submitted their question.
Chatlets, the early form of what would have become a more substantial integration platform. Note the Salesforce tab, the integration that likely gained the attention of Salesforce.
Sometime before the acquisition, I began the development of a new set of tools for the Activa Live Chat platform, including this reporting console which was a prototype built in HTML and jQuery.
We had plans in the works to rewrite the Agent Console in HTML before the acquisition. I designed and completely rebuilt the console in HTML as seen in the above prototype. However, this was never launched as we were soon merged into Salesforce’s Agent Console.
Shortly after the acquisition, we merged our tools into a suite of Salesforce Live Agent experiences. Here, a dashboard for admins to configure and monitor Live Agent.
The acquisition started in 2009 and closed in 2010.
