Question
Is it possible to completely hide the department field called Choose a department on the pre-chat form?
Answer
You can hide the department field from visitors by using the Departments API end-point with an empty array.
<script type="text/javascript"> window.zESettings = { webWidget: { chat: { departments: { enabled: [] } } } }; </script>
This code prevents visitors from selecting a department. You can still assign a department to a chat request using a trigger or the departments.select function.
For more information, see the articles below:
10 Comments
Hi,
Is it possible to find the ID of a department so that we dont need to use the string of the name in our code? Sometimes we change the department name but want to ensure we dont need to update the code every time this happens.
I went to the chat dashboard and went to "Departments" and only saw the names of departments, but no IDs.
Any help would be great, as every article I click on seems to lead me to another article and another... :)
- Kristin
Hi Kristin,
If you have a standalone Chat account you should be able to get the department ID by first logging into your dashboard then navigating to zopim.com/api/v2/departments.
However, if you have an integrated Chat account with Support things get a little trickier here. You would need to use the following instructions to generate an OAuth token for your integrated Chat account so you can pull this information from the API: Chat API tutorial: Generating an OAuth token (integrated Chat accounts)
Hope this information helps!
Brett,
We are already using the API and we found what we were looking for with that, thank you for pointing me in the right direction! :)
Happy to help Kristin :)
Is it possible to remove a field? In our case, we would like to remove the phone number from one of our websites chat, but the form itself is a shared form, so we want to keep the field in place. If we cant remove it, can we hide it? Our attempts at using common jQuery or JavaScript methods are failing. Thanks!
Hello Kiva Bostrom,
We would also like to request the ability to remove the department field (and more generally, be able to customize this form to add other custom fields). After working with your support team, the code snippet is not working for us and we do not have engineering resources to tap into to investigate.
Hi I understand that the API solution will apply for the chat widged that customers see in external pages. How about changing the prechat form for the chat window in my Zendesk helpdesk?
How could I do that? Thanks for your help
Hello Andrew and Marcela Arango,
The only native functionality that removes the department dropdown from the pre-chat form is to turn off all your departments. Beyond that it does unfortunately require the use of API and custom coding.
The pre-chat form is quite hard coded and it is not possible to add custom fields either.
That being said, you can customize all of the fields and even have multiple forms available to visitors if you use the Web Widget. It's not a perfect solution of course because the Web Widget presents forms as a way to make a ticket, rather than before a chat is started.
Finally, Marcela Arango, if you're looking to use the API coding mentioned in this article in your Zendesk Guide Help Center instead of your own webpage, you can use these directions to help: How do I customize the Web Widget in my Help Center using APIs?
I'm sorry I don't have better solutions! I hope that helps a bit!
Thanks!
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