We are excited to announce a new feature update to our Customer Portal: Messenger authentication via the Portal APIs. 

This enhancement allows you to integrate Messenger into your customer portal, leveraging customer user authentication to automatically identify the customer and securely launch authenticated chat sessions.

With this update, Messenger now supports three states:

1. Anonymous: An unknown user is chatting from an unauthenticated site (e.g. your marketing site).
2. Identified: A user is identified based on an match of email, phone number, name, ID, and/or other parameters.
3. Authenticated: A server-generated JWT is passed to Messenger to securely authenticate the session for the user, ensuring you know exactly who you are chatting with.

The new authenticated sessions enable you to handle more sensitive requests with confidence, knowing you are interacting with the correct user. This improves the user experience by allowing customers to be automatically logged in and start chatting immediately with all the context of their customer profile and history.

Additionally, the new authenticated Messenger sessions enhance AI Agent capabilities. With authenticated sessions, your AI Agents have access to more tools to provide better answers, look up data, and take more actions automatically for the customer. This leads to better, faster, and more robust chat experiences while allowing your team to focus on the most complex issues after agent-to-human handoff.

We believe this update will significantly enhance your customer chat interactions and streamline your support processes.