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Can I restrict Chat support to a specific group of users on the help center?

Mark Nino Valencia
  • Edited

Question

I want to have the Web Widget (Classic) on my help center and offer special VIP customers an option to chat with my agents.

Answer

To offer chat support through the Web Widget (Classic) to specific users, follow one of the methods described in this article.

Method 1: Use a hyperlink to navigate to the chat page directly

  1. Create a user segment that contains all your VIP users. 
  2. In your help center, create a category, section, and article. Set the article permissions so that it is only visible to that specific user segment.

Chat_user_segment.jpg

Follow the steps below to create a link that opens a Chat window in a new browser tab.

  1. Generate a chat link. See the article: Can I create a direct link to a live chat popout window instead of using the widget?
  2. In the article, add a line that says Click here to chat.

All users will see the Web Widget (Classic), but only your VIP customers can access the link to chat with you.

Method 2: Leverage the API to identify a user's organization and suppress the chat function when necessary

  1. Use the identify API to capture the user's organization information.
  2. Use the suppress feature in the Web Widget (Classic) API to either hide or show the widget based on the user's organization name.

For more information, see the developer documentation: Restrictions and Responsibilities.

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7 Comments

  • David Nguyen

    Would it be possible for the web widget be available to all users for answer bot, but chat not be an option for either visitors (non-signed in users) or organizations with a specific tag (such as VIP/Non-VIP/Trial/Premium/etc.) ?

    0
  • Blanca
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi David,

    Thank you for reaching out. I am sorry that at the moment, there is no functionality to have the answer bot available to all end-users while the chat widget to be restricted to a specific organization/user with certain tags. With the thread above, I hope that you can find something close to your use case though.

    Cheers,
    Blanca

    0
  • Laura Mirto

    Hello! 

    Does anyone have an example of the js if you would like to suppress the chat widget based on organization tags? For example, we only want users that belong to organizations with the tag "customer" to see the chat widget. 

    Here is where I am currently at and it is not working:

      for (var c in HelpCenter.user.organizations) {
      if (HelpCenter.user.organizations[c].tags !== "customer"){
         zE('webWidget', 'updateSettings', {
          webWidget: {
            chat: {
                suppress: true
          },
    0
  • Greg Katechis
    Zendesk Developer Advocacy

    Hi Laura, couple questions:

    • Are you looking to hide the widget entirely or suppress the chat option, but keep other options?
    • When you say this isn't working, could you let me know what debugging you've done to determine at what point in the function it isn't working?
    0
  • Laura Mirto

    Hi Greg, 

    I would like to hide the widget entirely. Below the lines I shared above, I have the other suppress options as well for contactForm, helpCenter, talk, and answerBot. 

    Currently, I am testing this change on an inactive theme to ensure it works. When I am previewing that theme I can still see the widget when switched to anonymous. My thought for this was if the user was anonymous then they wouldn't have the organization tag to meet the requirements. 

    As a test, I was able to have the widget hide based on the user role with the suppress feature. 

     

    Thanks for the help!

    Laura M

     

    0
  • Greg Katechis
    Zendesk Developer Advocacy
    Thanks for that info! Since you're looking to hide the widget altogether, the best way to start with this would be to hide it by default to start off with. This way you don't have to worry about execution delays that might briefly show the widget and then hide it after. To hide it entirely, you'll want to use this command.
     
    With respect to the code snippet itself, you can do something like this:
     
    for (var c in HelpCenter.user.organizations) {
      if (HelpCenter.user.organizations[c].tags.includes("customer")){
          zE('webWidget', 'show');}}

    Since you're looking for a specific value in an array, you need to use some sort of array lookup tool. I chose includes, but there may be reasons to use other options. Let me know if you run into any issues with this!
    0
  • Laura Mirto

    This appears to be working. Thanks again for the help! 

    0

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