The Helpy connect messenger widget gives your customers another way to ask questions and get help from your team. Connect gives customers access to relevant knowledge base documents or real-time chat, right where they need it- inside your app or online store. The chat adds a real-time interface which makes it possible for agents to chat with customers live, or respond after the fact. If no agents are available within a specified amount of time, a message will be displayed indicating that no one is currently available, and when agents respond, their response will be delivered by email to the customer.

In this guide, you will learn:

• Configuring the chat widget
• Configuring the knowledge base integration
• Setting chat hours
• Designating agents/teams for chat
• Installing the chat on your site

To access configuration for the widget, head to the settings panel, and select “general settings” in the “chat” section. You will see a screen similar to that shown below, including a number of options for how the chat messenger will work:

Connect Widget feature toggles

The widget can operate with either chat or the knowledgebase connect solutions turned on, or both.

Enable chat widget: Determines whether or not the chat option is turned on.

Enable Solutions: The Solutions feature brings content from your Knowledgebase right into the widget, in a way that is designed to accelerate customer solutions and deflect chats for your team. To learn more about using solutions, customizing what is shown on different pages, and more, see the next section.

Chat features

Display a pre-chat form? Turning this feature on will show a short pre-chat form that prompts the customer for their name, email address, and reason for contact. Disabling this allows the customer to begin chatting immediately without providing any information.

Auto-assign to an available agent. When enabled, new chats will automatically be assigned to any available agent designated as a “chat agent”. If the customer has indicated that they want to contact a specific team, then chat availability will be limited to that team.

Available groups When the pre-chat form is turned on, you can prompt the customer for which team they would like to chat with. Pick any teams you wish to be included in the pre-chat form here. If you don’t pick any teams, this field will not appear in the pre-chat form.

Chat widget design

Chat header text This controls what is shown at the top of the chat widget.

Initial chat message  This value is shown to introduce the customer to the chat experience and varies depending on whether the pre-chat form is enabled. When the form is enabled, this message is displayed in the form text field. When the form is disabled and the customer is taken directly into chat, the message is displayed as the first chat message from the agent

Chat placeholder  This is shown inside of the chat message text field

Chat unavailable message. This message will be displayed to the customer if there are no agents immediately available to respond to the customer. It is good to set expectations that it make take some and the response may come via email.

Seconds to wait before the unavailable message is shown This controls how many seconds to wait for an agent to arrive before the chat unavailable message is displayed

Chat background color  This is the color used for the chat header area and the background of agent chat messages.

Chat panel color This is the background color of the chat panel

Chat widget CSS styles Use this area to provide your own css styles to further customize the chat widget

Chat to email  

Helpy chat includes the ability to respond to customers by email if the agent responds after the fact (typical if the agent is unavailable at the time the chat request comes in). This feature is automatic and will detect if the customer is no longer present in the chat and send the agent's response by email if the email of the customer initiating the chat is known. The agent may need to add the customer’s email address if it is not automatically set.

Follow up by email if the customer does not reply Whether or not to follow up with the customer by email if the customer appears to have left the chat or gotten distracted.

Seconds to wait before the followup The number of seconds to wait for the customer to acknowledge or respond to the agent's most recent message before sending an alert to the customer.

Note: If the customer replies to the email message, their response will be threaded into the chat conversation.