Chat

Chat is becoming more and more important in the customer support. If used properly, support via chat can be a real efficiency booster.

How to improve Support by Chat?

We’ve asked others about their opinion in our circles, to learn what people expect or dislike. This is what we found out:

Good experiences
  • Getting personal support by a human being

  • Getting a fast response

  • Solving my problem quickly

Bad experiences
  • A chat window on a website (while the chat being offline) with the hint to “Leave a message”

  • Long waiting queues before even writing with a personal

  • Receiving a message like “My name is Nina, what can I do for you?” after sending a message with my issue.

  • A Chat that doesn’t integrate itself into the Website properly

Our answer: The Zammad Chat Widget

The task is clear: Work on the disadvantages of a regular support chat and improve them.

Our approach is as follows
  • We’ll only display the chat widget, if at least one agent is available and the agent still has capacity.

    • If no agent is online or the agents are absent, the chat won’t be available

  • We’re setting an agent as inactive, if the agent doesn’t accept new chat requests or the WebApp is offline. This way, your support staff can take breaks without your customers waiting ages for a reaction (see point above)

  • Zammad does not respond to chat messages on it’s own to ensure that there’s no strange delay coming afterwards. Zammad will fire a (configurable by agent) auto response as soon as the agents accepts the Chat request.

  • Zammad will try to adapt your main website colors to the chat. You can also adjust those colors allowing you to customize it to your corporate design.

Configuration of the Chat widget

You can create chat widgets for your web pages to allow visitors to chat with you.

The area for configuring the chat can be found in the admin area at Channels > Chat:

../_images/channel-chat-1.png

You can set up chats for different websites and edit them independently. The integrated designer helps the chat-widget to adapt to the website color. If you don’t like the proposed design, you can manually adjust the design. Through the different previews you have the possibility to display directly how the presentation looks on different devices.

../_images/channel-chat-2.png

Usage

Insert the widget code into the source code of every page on which you want the chat to be visible on. It should be placed at the end of the page’s source code before the </body> closing tag.

../_images/channel-chat-4.png

Result

The final result will look like the following:

../_images/channel-chat-5.png

Requirements

Zammad chat requires jQuery. If you don’t already use it on your website include it like this:

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.6.0.min.js"></script>

You have two options to implement the chat on your website:

  • Automatically show chat (that’s the default-setting)

  • or manually open chat.

Chat restrictions

You offer a chat for your target group, but you don’t want to activate chat for certain IP addresses or countries? Then you have the possibility to block the wished IP addresses and countries fast and easily via the chat configuration in the admin panel. The configuration panel looks like this:

../_images/channel-chat-3.jpg

You can also find more information about the chat customization in the admin area.