Website live chat widget
A visitor to your website sees a chat bubble. What they write arrives in the omnichannel inbox as a live chat conversation, is routed like any other channel, and the agent's replies appear in the visitor's window. Visitors can be offered a click-to-call upgrade where video is enabled.
Requirements
- Public HTTPS at your PBX address. Browsers on other websites load the script from it.
- A live chat channel, created in Admin > Channels with no provider and no credentials.
Set it up
- Create the live chat channel and optionally its route.
- Open Admin > Live chat for that channel. Set the look, greetings, pre-chat fields, allowed origins and banned addresses.
- Copy the snippet the page shows and paste it before
</body>on each allowed website.
Until an origin is allowed, nothing may embed the widget. This is the default.
Settings
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Title, colour, side | Header text, accent colour and bubble position |
| Greeting and offline greeting | First line while agents are online and while they are away |
| Online | When off, a visitor must leave an email address or phone number so the message can be answered |
| Pre-chat fields | Name, email and phone can each be off, optional or required; applied to the first message |
| Allowed origins | Up to 20, for example https://www.example.com |
| Banned addresses | Up to 500 IPv4 or IPv6 addresses |
Live behaviour
- Push, not polling. An open chat window keeps a server-sent event stream to the PBX, so an agent's reply appears at once. The PBX closes it after about a minute and the window reconnects; if the stream cannot be kept open (a proxy that buffers it, or too many open chats) the window falls back to asking every 4 seconds. A reverse proxy must not buffer
/widget/.../stream; the PBX sendsX-Accel-Buffering: no. - Typing. The visitor sees "typing" while an agent types, and agents can see whether the visitor is typing. Indicators last six seconds and are kept in memory on the node that served them.
- Read receipts. The visitor's messages show "Read" once an agent has opened the conversation or replied.
- Transcript by e-mail. When the company can send e-mail and the visitor gave an e-mail address in the chat, a link in the window sends them the conversation. It goes only to that address, once an hour per conversation.
Languages
The widget speaks the product's nine languages and picks one from the browser's language list. Titles and greetings are shown as you wrote them.
Abuse protection
Visitor requests are rate limited per client address, and the company is found from the random key in the snippet, never from the request.