Welcome to Live Chat in Zoho Support. The Live Chat adds up as a channel of communication with your customers, wherein you could interact with them in real time over text chat. But that's not all! You can quickly create a request from a chat session with your complete communication being added to its description. Your customers can initiate a chat session from your customer facing self-service portal or, if you allow it, even from your business website by copy-pasting 2 lines of code.
To configure Live Chat in Zoho Support, follow the steps mentioned below. Go to Setup –>> Chat –>> Chat Settings. In the Chat Settings page, click Enable Chat. You have now enabled Live Chat for your support portal successfully.
Alternatively, you can click the Chat tab from the header bar to enable Live Chat for your support portal.
You're now a few steps away from providing support via text chat. Once you have enabled Live Chat,
You can choose to display Live Chat as a button or(and) as a float window in your customer facing self-service portal.
To display Live chat -
Once you check an option, the Live Chat button/float window would be automatically displayed in your customer portal without the hassle of embedding any script.
Yes, you customize the look & feel of the Live Chat button and the Float Window according to your taste and requirements.
To customize the looks of the Chat Button, click Customize, displayed next to the Embed Chat Button in Customer Portal check box.
In the Chat Button Appearance screen, you can customize the following:
To customize the looks of the Float Button, click Customize, displayed next to the Embed Float Button in Customer Portal check box.
In the Float Button Appearance screen, you can customize the following:
Yes, you can customize the look & feel of the Chat window your customers would interact with you in. To customize the chat window, click Customize under the heading Embed Window Configuration.
In the Chat Window Appearance screen, you can customize the following:
Absolutely. You can embed the Live Chat Button and/or the Float Window anywhere, if you think it would serve your need. All it requires is copying the snippet code displayed alongside the button/float window on your Live Chat setting screen and embedding it on your website. You need not worry about losing your customizations as they would be safely carried forward with your snippet.
If you have more than one department, you can enable Live Chat for one or all of your departments. To enable Live Chat for a department, go to Setup ->> Chat ->> Chat Setting. In the following page and under the heading Chat Department Configuration, select the departments to be enabled for Live Chat and click Save.
Alternatively you can enable a department for Live Chat by following the steps mentioned below:
Note:
You need to specify atleast one support representative, to save your chat settings for a department. Also requests created from chat would be associated with the related department when it is enabled for Live Chat.
You can enable only Public Departents for Live Chat. To check the status of a departement, go to Setup >> Organization >> Departments. In the departments list page, click edit besides a department. Check whether the department is set as visible in customer portal. If not the department if set to Private and hence cannot be added for Live Chat.
You can enable a support rep to attend to chat request from your customers.
To enable a support rep for live chat, follow the steps mentioned below:
This should activate the Support Rep to attend to chat requests from your customers.
Once, you had activated a support rep for Live Chat, you need to associate him/her to a department to receive chat requests in it.
To associate a support rep to a department, follow the steps mentioned below:
Hooray! You have now activated a support rep for Live Chat & have associated them to a department to receive chat requests from.
Note: You can associate a support rep with more than one department to receive chat requests from.
Advanced settings for Live Chat allows you to personalise chat settings according to your business needs. Advanced chat configuration includes setting your type status, sharing files, viewing chat statistics, collecting chat feedback, recording chat transcripts and a lot more.
To access these settings click Chat tab from the header. In the Chat detail page, select Chat Configuration from the left panel.
Let us go through the varied option available under the advanced chat configuration below:
You can add the IP address you may wish to block from receiving chat requests. Both helpdesk administrators and support reps can add IPs to be black-listed. However, when your support reps add an IP address you would require to approve their action via an e-mail alert sent to you.
To block an IP, follow the steps mentioned below:
Customers pinging from the black-listed IP addresses cannot access your embedded chat widget in Zoho Support.
Canned Messages are pre-defined frequently used messages that agents can apply while replying to a chat. You can as well categorize and save your canned message by agent or per department under the Categories section in Canned Messages.
To add a Canned Message, follow the steps mentioned below:
You/your agents can now choose this Canned Message while responding to chat requests.
You can create canned messages and group them together by creating categories in Live Chat.
To create a category, follow the steps mentioned below:
You can now create canned messages as explained earlier and add them to the above category for ease of use. You can create multiple categories to keep your canned messages in an organized manner.
Chat history allows you to store the transcript of your Live Chat in your Zoho Support account so you can easily search for them later. Under chat history, you can view the details like Name and E-mail address of the customers who were supported through Live Chat and their corresponding support reps.
You can also choose to view only those chats that were picked by you using Assigned to Me filter displayed at the top right corner of the page. Besides the view, you are also provided with filter options to view chat history based on your requirements.
To access your chat history, click the Chat label from the header bar at the top and select History from the left panel. A list of chats will appear, similar to the way conversations are listed in your inbox.
Support reps at any point of time can raise a request for their chat conversation in Zoho Support. A request with a unique Id would be created which can be worked on by the support reps once they close their chat. The request would contain an exact transcript of the chat communication between the customer and the agent.
To create a request for a chat communication, support reps can click Convert Chat as Request, displayed on the right panel within the chat screen. Alternatively, you can click Add as Request displayed at the bottom after the chat session is complete.
Besides raising a new request, support reps can as well search for an existing request sent by customers. While chatting with a customer, a support rep can search for an existing request by providing one of the following values - Request Id, E-mail Address, Contact Name or Account Name.
To access an existing Request,
This should associate the current chat transcript with the existing request successfully.
We understand that your support reps may get busy or wouldn't be available at all times. But you never need to worry about chat requests fallen through cracks. Zoho Support takes care of missed chats with ease. When a chat request is missed, the system would automatically send an e-mail alert containing the message from the customer, besides other vital visitor information to the administrator's e-mail.
This is not all. Incase you miss a chat request from a customer, the system would create a new request with a unique Id which would as well contain the visitor's information. This would help you to communicate with the customer over e-mail.
Your Live Chat status controls your availability to chat with your customers in Zoho Support. Here's what the different statuses mean:
You can set your chat status from the top right hand corner of your Zoho Support screen, next to the setup link. Kindly note that, you would be provided with an option to set your chat status only when you are activated to receive chat requests.
Besides setting your availability, you can mute or unmute the ringer while receiving a chat request. Set your ringer status to ON or OFF from the status window.
Yes. Tansfer Chat feature comes in handy when you do not have the correct resources and are unable to answer a visitor's questions. In such a situation, you could transfer the visitor to an operator that is able to answer the visitors questions. To transfer a chat while being on an active session, follow the steps mentioned below:
The above action should send a chat transfer invite to the new support rep who can accept the request to complete the transfer.
Note:
You can transfer a chat to support reps who belong to both available & away statuses.
Absolutely! You can invite to chat as many operators as you need and there is no limitation. To invite another support rep to an existing chat session, please do the following:
The above action should send a chat invite to support rep(s) who can accept the invite to join the current chat session.
There are instances wherein a customer would have submitted a ticket via your customer portal, but wanted to follow-up on it over chat. Let's see how live chat makes this simple for both your customers and support reps in your organization.
When customers login into your customer portal to track the status of their tickets, they can simply click Chat About This Request option, located alongside the ticket. This would initiate a new chat request in your agent's interface. On accepting the chat request, an agent can view the details about the customer's ticket which helps him/her provide appropriate support within a short span of time.
Yes, at any point of time, if you would like to disable Live Chat channel in Zoho Support you can follow the steps mentioned below:
Note:
Disabling live chat would remove the chat widgets from your customer portal besides those embedded elsewhere (say., your business website). However all other chat settings including support rep/department mappings would stay intact.
