Recipe: Automatically route chats based on department online status

Systems with multiple departments may have a use case where administrators wish to automatically route chat requests to a specific department.

For example, a customer has a website for Australia and for Germany. There are two support teams represented in Zopim by two different departments. The administrator knows that all the visitors on the Australian website should be served by Department_Australia (static value, manually set by the admin in the script, and doesn’t need to know about the other departments and their statuses). The administrator has the following requirements:

• If Department_Australia is offline, the system hides the widget
• If Department_Australia is online, the system sets the department (Department_Australia) and hides the dropdown list (select department) option from the widget

Using the Web Widget Chat API, you can identify the status of the involved department prior to displaying the widget on the page, using the following actions:

• Hide the widget when the relevant department is offline
• Display the widget and automatically route a potential chat request to the relevant department

<script>
zopim(function(){ 
 $zopim.livechat.setOnConnected(function(){ 
  var previous_status; 
 
  $zopim.livechat.setOnStatus(function(){      
      var new_status = $zopim.livechat.departments.getDepartment("your_department").status; 

      if(!previous_status || new_status !== previous_status) { 
    if(new_status !== "offline") { 
        $zopim.livechat.setStatus("online"); 
    } else { 
        $zopim.livechat.setStatus("offline"); 
    } 
    previous_status = new_status; 
      } 
  }); 
 }); 
});
</script>