When your widget is offline, visitors can leave a message with their contact information in the offline form.
This article discusses the following topics:
Editing the offline form message
By default, this form is enabled with the message shown "Sorry, we aren't online at the moment. Leave a message and we'll get back to you." You can edit the message that appears or disable the form completely.
The process for setting up the offline form is the same for both Chat Standalone and integrated Chat + Support accounts; however, if you are on an integrated account, the offline form is disabled automatically if you are using the contact form in the Web Widget (Classic).
To edit the offline form message
- In your Chat dashboard, go to Settings > Widget and click the Forms tab.
- In the Offline Form section, make sure the form is enabled by toggling it On.
- Edit the text in the Offline Greeting field, then click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
To disable the offline form
- In your Chat dashboard, go to Settings > Widget and click the Forms tab.
- In the Offline Form section, click Off, then click Save Changes at the
bottom of the page.
Enabling messaging channels
If you want to link out to your social messaging channels when the widget is offline, you can toggle on the following channels:
- Facebook Messenger
- X (formerly Twitter) Direct Messages
Facebook Messenger
To add your Facebook account, you will need to specify your Facebook username or page ID. We recommend using the page ID because it is constant whereas you can change your username.
To get your page ID
- Open your Facebook page and click on the About tab.
- Scroll to the bottom of the More Info section and you will see the specific Page ID. Copy and paste that number into the offline form settings page.
X (formerly Twitter) Direct Messages
To add your X (formerly Twitter) account, you will need to specify your X user ID.
To get your X user ID
- Log in to your X account.
- Go to Your X Data page.
- Under the Username field, copy and paste the User ID number into the offline form settings page.
When turning on X Direct Messages on the widget, you will want to ensure that you have turned on "Receive Direct Messages from anyone"in your X account.
31 comments
Nicole Saunders
Hi Smith,
If you are on a Team, Professional, or Enterprise plan, you can edit the message as described in the article above under "Editing the offline form message". If you are on an Essential plan, you will not be able to edit this message.
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Demo CNL1
How do I make sure that I have different translations for the Offline form text ? The default text is 'Sorry, we aren't online at the moment. Leave a message and we'll get back to you' but we have visitors from all over the world.
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Elissa Tikalsky
HI @...,
Unfortunately the offline message text doesn't auto-translate, but you can override/localize this string with the API as described here: https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables/docs/widget/settings#offlineform.
I hope that helps!
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Camilo Gomez
Is there a way to localized the language of the offline form so that it gets translated to the user's language settings?
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Michael Froeming
Hi Camilo,
By default, the Web Widget embedded in a website displays text in the end user’s language, based on the language of their browser. For example, if the end user's browser language is set to de for German, the widget will appear in German for that user. If the widget is embedded in a Help Center, it displays text based on the Help Center language setting.
For more information on language settings in the widget, see the articles: Displaying the widget in a different language and How do I change or set the language in the widget on my website?
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9307-8509 Quebec Inc
This is to share an extremely frustrating situation I’ve been experiencing in the past few weeks and I hope you will be able to assist us as soon as possible.
So the help support line of Zendesk have been modified for the past 2-3 weeks.
We now cannot chat with any agents. There is a chat bot/widget that initiates a conversation when inquiring about any support on the website.
It links us to articles but when wanting further help, the widget mentions that a ticket is automatically created and that an agent will contact us through the widget or email (both)
I’ve opened 3-4 tickets in the past weeks and NO agents have reached out to me
The last three, of the same urgent issue, are #9794255, #9794259 and #9794249
I received one email signaling that they’ve received my request and a ticket was created, followed by another ticket confirming that an agent is reviewing my request.
But then, nothing, no follow ups. I went on the tickets itself and not updates are shown.
My company, APP GROUP, is launching our biggest sale of the year today at 8pm, and I needed the WIDGET OFFLINE to be activated to properly inform our clients of the business hours and other important info. We are receiving a huge flux of contacts and I need to get this fixed as soon as possible.
I’ve done everything that the article has asked me to do as its really straightforward but no changes are shown on our site.
Can you please assist me or refer me to an actual human support?
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Ramin Shokrizadeh
9307-8509 Quebec Inc Thanks for posting your question and I am sorry you didn't receive a response from our advocacy team. It isn't the experience we normally aim to deliver so I am sure an advocacy manager will look into the issue.
For your product question, I can provide some guidance on what you want to achieve for your holiday sale. Since you are using the Web Widget, you should be using the contact form over the offline form in Chat. Offline form is designed more for our legacy Chat standalone customers.
You can enable the contact form and temporarily disable Chat in the Web Widget by looking at these articles:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408836216218#topic_yj3_sv2_wfb
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408824462106
If you want Chat to be available only on certain pages, you can look at using the suppress Javascript API instead of disabling the channel completely in Admin Center: https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/widget/settings/#suppress
Since you are using Guide in the Web Widget already, some of our customers create a help center article with a specific label associated with it and you can then tell the Web Widget via Javascript API to suggest that article when visitors click on the launcher. In the article, you can detail expected response times or when live chat will become available again. You can learn more about the article suggestion API here: https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/widget/help-center-api/#helpcentersetsuggestions
Hope that helps and good luck with your upcoming sale, apologies again for the poor response time from the messages you sent to the advocacy team.
Thanks,
Ramin
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Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Dear Zendesk Community,
With this piece of code we succeeded to have a different offline greetings for each language on our guide helpcenter (even using dynamic content!) but it is not working on our website, do you have a solution/tips please?
Thank you & best regards
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Tipene Hughes
Hey Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr,
Thanks for reaching out!
Just to clarify, you're seeing the greetings appear correctly on the web widget in your help center, but the web widget embedded in your external website is not displaying the appropriate language greetings?
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Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Hi Tipene Hughes,
Exactly! It is displaying the one we can set up in Chat>Widget>Offline form greeting that doesn't accept dynamic content
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Tipene Hughes
Hi Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr,
Apologies for the delay in getting back to you!
Thanks for clarifying this for me. To confirm, have you also added the code snippet you shared above to the JavaScript code of your website? Adding it to the JavaScript file of your help center will only affect the web widget as it appears in your help center.
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Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Yes I did but I found another way: using the custom form and switching his name by a dynamic content. It is easier than the offline form + it allows the customer to add an attachment,
Thank you!
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Tipene Hughes
Have a great day :)
Tipene
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Ryan K.
Hi there!
I'm wondering if there's a way to remove the offline form and just place text for the end-user to read? For example:
"Our live chat support is closed at this time. Please submit a ticket here:"
It seems like I cannot remove the textfields that are there.
If I can't replace the text, can I at least change out the text that says "Sorry, we are not online at the moment"?
Thanks!
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Christine
Using the Classic Web Widget, you can disable the Contact Form if you don't want to present the Ticket Form to end-users. But please note that this applies when the widget is both online and offline. There's no way to configure the form to be presented only when the widget is online, because this setting applies to both online and offline widget status.
Then you can replace the Offline Greeting text here:
Navigate to the Chat dashboard > Settings > Widget > Forms > Offline Form
The widget will appear similar to this:
Hope this helps! See Editing the offline form message for more details.
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Ryan K.
Hey @...,
Thanks for your quick response!
Two things:
Image attached below to illustrate the screen:
I'm wondering if I can change this specific screen's text.
Thank you!!!
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Christine
Currently, there is no way to customize that string and the only solution for custom text is to use the offline form.
If you have some time, I recommend that you start a feedback post on Feedback - Chat and Messaging (Chat) using our Product Feedback Post Template. Our Product Managers are constantly reviewing feature requests submitted in our forum to be considered in our future updates. Thank you!
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Jeroen Mulder
Hi,
I used the above example in the document_head.hbs on the Help Center template.
I did manage to change the offlineform text but I can't manage to change the concierge text as well.
Do I make an error in the {} position?
I forgot a ',' as can be read below in the comment of Dave Dyson.
Fixed the error in the script so people can copy it.
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Dave Dyson
I think you might be missing a comma after the closing curly bracket before "concierge:" ?
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Jeroen Mulder
Thanks! That did the trick.
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Dave Dyson
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Jeroen Mulder
once again I added a form. The pre chat form. Can't get it to work. Did I forget a , or a {}?
OK. I found it. Not 1 comma but a lot :-). It works now.
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Greg Katechis
Glad you found those, looks good now! If you don't have a prettifier/linter in your IDE, I recommend something like https://jshint.com/, where you can plunk your JS to see if it returns any errors. Just make sure to remove any HTML (the script tags in this case) otherwise it will return a bunch of errors.
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Mark Pryshliak
Hey guys! Our team is trying to set up offline chat triggering instead of online for specific GEO, is this possible?
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Jeroen Mulder
When I would like to set my local fixed to one language According to the API documentation I could use: zE('webWidget', 'setLocale', 'de');
WHERE would I add it to the code?
I found where to add it...
Just follow this example
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/classic-web-widget-sdks/web-widget/quickstart-tutorials/web-widget-javascript-apis/
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Manuel Moreira
This is not available for Messaging, is it?
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Gabriel Manlapig
Yes, offline form is not available in Messaging.
Messaging is designed to be a semi-synchronous channel, it doesn't have a separate offline form. As it happens in a more conversational way and tickets are being created when the "Transfer to agent" step is reached. The only way to collect more information is by adding the custom ticket fields to "Ask for details step" which would need to be implemented before transferring to an agent.
For more information, please see this article: Understanding answer flow step types
I hope that helps!
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Mike
We are using Messaging and Bot. I am looking for the modification of these topics:
1. Where can I modify the Bot offline message?
2. How can I request the name of the customer?
For now it is just requesting the e-mail.
3. How can I make sure that e-mail as well as the name of the customer are submitted to the ticket?
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
We can only see the anonymous name of the webuser:
The offline message and the request for customer name are not visible at the chat trigger:
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Christine Diego
There is no option to customise the message, however you can turn off the Chat Trigger which sends this and use Flow Builder out of business hours condition to set expectations / request for email. And lastly, for capturing name of the user, you can use the ticket fields (text or dropdown types) to capture customer data such as name, email, and any other information that can be helpful to collect to power the rest of the conversation.
More information can be found here.
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kyriacos avraamides
Hello,
Is there a way to completely disable the offline form?
I have disabled it however when all my agents are invisible the form still appears and asks for an inquiry and email.
I'd like for the message to be something like “Chat is not available at the moment. Please send us an email with your inquiry at example@example.com”
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