Step Up Authentication overview

General Information

From the perspective of the messaging experience, authenticated and unauthenticated conversations are very different. There are instances when a consumer logs into the Brand's system in the middle of a conversation, and in some of these cases, agents would like to have the full context of these disparate conversations. This can be accomplished by including Step-Up settings to the Live Person account configuration. With Ste- Up configured the agent will see that the consumer is authenticated and both agent and consumer will be able to see messages from the beginning of the conversation. 

Below is an example of a conversation that was “stepped up”. There are two images representing the same conversation for both consumer and agent. The flow is as follows:

• Consumer starts an unauthenticated conversation and gets asked by the agent to log into the system
• After the consumer logs in, the conversation becomes authenticated and the agent is able to see who is chatting as a consumer (name, message history, etc.)
• At the same time the consumer and the agent are able to gain content by seeing the previous messages and can continue the conversation based on the right context

Conversation step up. Consumer side.

Conversation step up. Agent side.

Prerequisites

• Setup unauthenticated messaging
  (Please reach out to LivePerson representative to get it activated on your account)
• Setup authenticated messaging
  There is a complete guide on authentication on our Developers Portal.
  (In case of any questions please reach out to LivePerson representative to get help in setting it up)
• Taglet configuration
  Unified Window taglet should be configured to be able to move the conversation through the Step Up authentication flow
  (Please reach out to LivePerson representative to get it configured on your account)

Conversation Cloud Configuration

After the prerequisites are completed, and engagement in needed from the Conversation Cloud side configured for an unauthenticated conversation. This is a regular process of Engagement creation - but please ensure the "Authentication" toggle is in an inactive state.

Engagement setup. Authentication off.

Optional Experience Configuration

Agents are notified with a unique indication once a conversation is stepped up, allowing agents to easily find the stepped-up conversation after the authentication by the consumer.

This experience can be enabled using the Management Console. Just search for Step Up conversation notifications.

Step Up conversation indication and notification

Limitations   

The Step Up feature is not supported for Live Chat. It can be used only with the Messaging channel. 

Using the Step Up feature across different domains (cross-domain) is not recommended. Cross-domain Step Up is currently only available in Chromium browsers (Chrome and Edge), and this partial support will be completely deprecated in all browsers by September 2024