If you use Zendesk Chat, you can enable end-users to initiate chat sessions with agents through your Help Center. If you offer Chat in the Web Widget on your Help Center, you do not need to enable Chat in Guide as described in this article.
To add Chat to you Help Center, you must enable the Chat setting in Guide, then add the chat component to your theme where you want the Chat widget to appear. You must be a Guide Manager on Guide Professional to add Chat to your Help Center.
About the end-user experience
When you enable Chat, the Chat widget is displayed in your Help Center when an agent is available. If no agent is available, the chat option is replaced by the option to leave a message.
The collapsed chat option looks like this:
Clicking the chat option opens a chat window:
Enabling the Chat setting in Guide
You must enable the Chat setting in Guide to offer Chat in your Help Center.
If you offer Chat in the Web Widget in your Help Center, you do not need to enable Chat in Guide. If you enable the Web Widget for your Help Center in Support and you enable the Chat widget in Guide, two widgets will appear in your Help Center.
To enable Chat
- In Guide, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar. - Under Integrations, select Chat.
Now you need to add the chat component to your Help Center theme.
Adding the chat component to your theme
After you enable the Chat setting in Guide, you need to add the chat component to your theme so that it appears in your Help Center.
To add a chat component to a Help Center template
- In Guide, click the Customize design (
) icon in the sidebar. - Click Edit Theme and select a template from the menu.
- Enter the chat component,
{{chat}}, in a template's HTML (see Customizing the HTML for more information).Insert the component in each template that you want to display Chat, or in the Footer template to display it on all pages.
- Click Save at the top of the sidebar to save your changes.
- When you're ready to deploy the change, click Publish changes at the top of the sidebar.
Comments
4 comments
Hi there,
We are on the regular plan. Will there be additional costs onto our subscription in order to use this?
Hey Storm!
This is a great question. The native Zendesk chat in Help Center will not incur any additional charges to use, but I do need to let you know that this feature is on the list to be deprecated at some point in the future.
We'll be sure to give you advanced notice that the feature is going away so you'll have time to prepare and move to a different solution, but what I might recommend instead is to look into Zopim chat, which is our newer (and much more robust) chat feature. This way, you'll be able to get your chat workflow up and running without having to worry about changing everything later down the line.
You can find more information about Zopim chat here: Introducing Zopim Chat
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
This doesn't work for me. I've enabled chat under "Integrations", and placed {{chat}} in my footer. I refresh the page & nothing happens. It doesn't even place anything within the container. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Kristin,
I'm going to create a ticket so we can investigate this one further with you from there. See you in the ticket. :)
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