contains a support chat interface that can be made available to end users. When a user requests a chat, a notification pops up for any staff on the team assigned to chat requests, asking them to accept the request. You can make chat functions available to power users by adding Chat Status to the navigation menu.
Chat can only be initiated from End User Interface. Power users can only reply to chat requests submitted by End Users. To enable staff-to-staff communication, see Broadcast Messages. |
Getting the chat feature up and running in your system requires a few different configuration changes:
To turn on the chat interface for your knowledgebase:
This opens the Access tab, which controls the power user side of the chat session. When a user requests a chat session, the session only begins when a staff member responds to the request. This prevents the user from waiting in an empty chat room. In a normal chat sequence, a user requests a chat, power users are notified, one of them responds, and the chat session begins.
With that in mind, configure the relevant settings:
If you selected round robin assignment, enter the waiting period for a user to accept the request before the next user is notified.
By default, checks for and notifies team members of new chat requests every 5 minutes. You should select a greater frequency for teams that receive chat messages. For more information, see Teams Wizard. |
This opens the Appearance tab, where you can configure how the chat window looks.
In the Include End-User HTML section, choose whether to use the default End User Look and Feel settings in the chat window. You can use the scheme with or without the header and footer HTML.
The background color of the chat window is configurable using the Form Background Color setting of the Look and Feel scheme. |
The rest of the configuration is done on the Mapping tab.
If you selected "Web page outside the program" on the General tab, the HTML tab appears at the end of the wizard. On this page, you can access the session hash code you will need to set up the chat for end users. Copy the contents of the HTML page into a word processor or other program so you can access it later in the setup.
Adding the chat for end user access can be done on any webpage, but is usually done using the EUI. In the EUI, you can launch a chat session with the #ew_chat()
macro, when the macro is added to a button or menu item. The #ew_chat()
macro uses the session hash code from the text you copied from the HTML tab.
Chat implementation is flexible, and your exact configuration might look different depending on your needs. You might want to make multiple types of chats available to different users based on group membership, or you might just need a simple chat button to show up for the whole Customer group. This page covers the basic ingredients of a successful chat implementation, but you can extend or modify these examples using other EUI tools. For more information about EUI configuration, see End User Interface.
This example describes how to set up a Sales chat button to users in the Customer group.
menu.htm
in the EUI Templates table. <!--<li id="chat"><a href='#ew_forward("chat.html")'>$ewText.get("menu.chat")–>
. This code would create a tab called Chat in the EUI, if it weren't wrapped in the <!-- -> comment tag. Simply removing this comment tag wouldn't be enough, because there is no chat.html
EUI template. Replace the line of code with the code block below. The script section is a piece of JavaScript that opens a small pop-up window. The conditional text below it is the -defined Velocity macro that evaluates whether the user is assigned to the Customer group. Then, $ew-Text.get("menu.chat")
finds the appropriate localized name for "Chat" from the translation.properties
EUI template. For more detail about localization in the EUI, see Text and Localization in the EUI.
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sessionHash=
and &project=
. This is the session hash, a unique value that identifies the chat configuration. If you were configuring multiple chat options for users, you would repeat these steps for each Chat configuration in Setup > Chat, since each one would have its own hash code.menu.htm
EUI Template and paste the session hash into the "hash" placeholder in the #ew-chat
macro, in the code you added in step 3. Make sure that after you paste the hash, it is still contained in quotation marks.Save this EUI template.
To test your work, log in as anyone in the Customer group to see the new Chat tab. Depending on the Chat configuration settings, you might need to have someone else sign in as a power user who is available to accept the chat, and you might need to do your testing during the receiver group's working hours.
While the example above provides a basic setup for one available type of Chat, if you wanted to have more types of Chat available, it isn't user-friendly to add separate tabs for each type. This is best handled with this menu.htm
code mentioned above in step 2:
<li id="chat"><a href='#ew_forward("chat.html")'>$ewText.get("menu.chat")</a></li> |
In this code, chat.html
refers to the page which should be first set up to show multiple chat options, which can optionally be hidden using the #if...#end
Velocity macro options. For instance, a company might have internal customers who might want to chat with support staff or HR staff. In that case you would set up a separate HTML page as an EUI Template record called chat.html
. To do this, perform the following steps:
In the EUI Templates table, locate and select the newsupport_case.htm
EUI Template and go to Actions > Copy.
chat.html
.Edit the new chat.html
record.
$ewText.get("newsc.title")
to $ewText.get("menu.chat")
.$ewText.get("newsc.header")
to Available Chat Teams
, with no macro. This bypasses the localization feature of $ewText.get()
but keeps the explanation short.Replace the <div id="main_frame">
contents with the new code, replacing the hash1 and hash2 placeholders with the session hash for each Chat configuration:
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This provides two different chat sessions for users in the Customer and Guest group, while those who are only in the Guest group see only the Sales Chat option. This setup requires you to set up a second chat definition in the Chat wizard at Setup > Chat and copy the session hash in each #ew_chat()
macro for the appropriate chat definition.
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