Set Up The Live Chat Channels App
Being in touch with your visitors and letting them know you're always just one message away is highly important in building trust and offering them a great experience in your store. Use the Live Chat Channels app to allow your visitors to communicate with you through familiar channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, plus much more!
What's more, you can customize each channel with their own unique agent name and role, providing an authentic experience to your visitors when they are talking with your team.
You can also customize how the chat bubble looks & feels, choosing the shape, background color, and animation that works best for your store. You can also show a welcome message to your visitors and customize it.
💡 If you feel your customers would rather get in touch with you via Facebook Messenger directly, you can decide to go with our Facebook Messenger Chat app instead, which provides an embedded, native integration.
How to create a channel/agent
Each contact option that you can use on your store is called a channel. The Live Chat Channels app can support multiple channels.
If there are no channels created yet, you can create your first one by clicking the "Create Agent" button:
From there, you can now start creating your channel. You can see the following settings that you can modify:
Status
- By default, it is set to Active, which means that it will appear on the store right away once the changes are saved. But you can change this to Draft if you would like to create the channel but don't want it to be live on the store yet.
Agent Settings
Select Platform
- This is where you choose the platform of the channel you're creating. You can choose among the 12 different platforms ranging from popular ones like WhatsApp , Email and SMS to uncommon ones like LinkedIn and SMS.
- For the specific requirements of each channel, kindly refer to the table on our Frequently Asked Questions section below.
Name
- Your desired agent name of the selected platform.
Agent Role
- The role/title of the agent.
Schedule
You can also set the schedule of your created channel. You can specify when this channel will appear on your Live Chat Channels app using the given 7-day interface.
▶️ Selected times are according to your current local timezone.
If you want this channel to operate 24/7, you can enable the option "Agent is always available online"
Once you're satisfied with your settings, click on the Save button and it will be added automatically to your list of agents.
Modifying the Live Chat Channels app's appearance settings
You can make different appearance modifications of the Live Chat Channels app via the Settings tab:
Below are some of the settings that you can modify:
Placement on mobile/desktop
You can choose to have the app to appear only on mobile or on Desktop by changing this setting. You can also choose the location of the widget on your store (either on the right side or on the left side)
Greeting message
You can set a greeting message that automatically appears after X seconds after a visitor visits the store for the first time. This is useful to notify your visitors about your available channels of support.
Appearance
In this section, you can modify the app's overall appearance like its shape, its colors, and its animation.
Additional Settings
Additional settings such as the live chat channel behavior when all agents are offline and the appearance of the Welcome Header (the message that appears on top of your channels) can be changed here as well:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
I chose X channel but I don't know what resource to insert. Where can I get that?
Depending on the channel chosen, it will ask for a different type of username to continue. Refer to the table below for each available channel.
💡 Make sure you fill in the correct usernames and please test the channel after you created it.
| Username | Example | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone number, with country code prefix | +40123456789 | ||
| Facebook Messenger | username handle | getvitals | It's at the end of the URL address, when you are on your profile's page: https://www.facebook.com/getvitals |
| email address | alex@gmail.com | ||
| handle | getvitals | It's at the end of the URL address, when you are on your profile's page: https://www.instagram.com/getvitals |
|
| handle | getvitals | It's at the end of the URL address, when you are on your profile's page: https://twitter.com/getvitals |
|
| Phone | Phone number, with country code prefix | +40123456789 | |
| SMS | Phone number, with country code prefix | +40123456789 | |
| business id | 37429873 | It's in the URL of your company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/37429873/admin/ |
|
| Telegram | handle | @username | Get it from settings > Edit profile |
| Snapchat | username | username | Get it from Settings > My account |
| TikTok | handle | @vitals.co | It's at the end of the URL address, when you are on your profile's page: https://www.tiktok.com/@toeasemymind |
| Apple | business id | 49086510 | From apple business manager, click Settings and get the Organization ID from the Enrolment Information section. Tutorial here. |