Note: This article applies to accounts using the messaging Web Widget. If you're using Web Widget (Classic), see Configuring the components in your Web Widget (Classic).
The Basics tab includes an editable Channel name field, and management settings for linking your social messaging channels to the Web Widget.
This article includes the following topics:
Updating channel name
The name field is automatically populated with the brand name. To make it easier to find in your channels list, you may want to update it to something easily recognizable.
To update the channel name
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select Messaging and social > Messaging. - Click the name of the channel you want to edit. The widget’s edit page opens.
- Click the Basics tab.
- In the Channel name field, delete the text you want to change.
- Enter the new name for the channel, then click the Save settings button at the bottom of the page.
Linking social channels
Social channel linking connects the messaging Web Widget to your WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM channels, allowing your end users to start conversations via the Web Widget and continue them in the social channel of their choice
For information on configuring social channel linking, see Linking social channels to your Web Widget.
98 Comments
I'm super excited about this new feature but I did want to ask: It says to paste the code on the page you want to use the messaging feature on but what if you want people to be able to access it on every page? Also, a true chat system gives you the options to have a " chat" pop up on a specific web page depending on some rules you make so would that be a possible option with the " flows" in messaging?
For example: If I have a customer browsing a page with " universal fitment" items and I want a chat to pop up and help them on that page, is that something I could build with messaging?
Is there any way to hide/show the widget? It appears the original web widget javascript methods (https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables/docs/widget/core#hide) do not work with this new messaging widget.
Hi @...,
Not as yet but we are working on it. They should be available in the next couple of weeks!
- Miranda.
Previously with chat, the chat would disengage at our closing time, letting people know that we were not available and allowed them to email a request. With the messenger is there a way to do that? We turned it on initially and after our normal chat hours closed, people were still able to try to talk to a human, even though nobody was online in chat. Any way to do updates based on whether or not there is someone to serve them, or (even better) based on what time it is?
Hi @...,
1. If you're using the Zendesk Web Widget today, there's no need to change the script in order to use messaging. You'll just need to enable it within your Admin Center. If you're hoping to use it on every page, then you'll need to have the snippet load on every page of your website.
2. Proactive messages are something that we're currently thinking about. It isn't available within messaging today but it's something on our radar. If you have any specific feedback to pass along, please submit it to our feedback portal for future consideration.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
As @... mentioned we don't want this happening either and we do not want to use answer bots for after hours.
Commenting again to bring visibility back: When the agents are offline we do not want the chat option to be there, or have the Icon even show, Is this something we would be able to set up with scheduling?
Hi Megan,
You can create an out-of-office message using Chat triggers to send an automated message when agents are offline. You can see how to set up this here.
Thanks,
Rajat
Hi, how i can change the avatar or the name of the bot, when i use the Web SDK messagin?
This isn't possible at the moment @.... The ability to customize the Answer Bot name of avatar is a feature we're planning to add in the future, however no ETA at this time.
Hi @... - quick follow up. What's currently more important to you: changing the name or changing the avatar? And would you say that this is a blocker for you deploying the web SDK and messaging experience, or just nice to have?
Hi there! I'm working with the new Zendesk Messaging Widget. I don't know how to offer my ticket form now I'm using this feature. Can you help me?
We have a similar bot through Gainsight PX on our product. We're interested in potentially including this in our own products, but I have a few questions:
Follow up on the potential Gainsight PX integration:
Another question now that I'm thinking about it:
Hi Dayana, with the messaging flow there's no option to present the user with a contact form.
Hi @..., I had the same question. We like messaging because it's a better experience with AnswerBot but would still much prefer to direct the customer to a web form, not a chat/messaging conversation. Any plans to add this in the future?
Is there a way to provide any user specific data to the web chat widget? I would like to be able to at a minimum initialize it with the user id or perhaps the email address we have on file.
Any news on ways to hide/show the widget? The original web widget javascript methods (https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables/docs/widget/core#hide) still do not work with this new messaging widget?? I need to show it only on certain pages in our Angular SPA, so "Add the code to every web page where you want the widget to appear." isn't a solution for us - we need to show/hide it based on current SPA route.
One more question: is it possible to test the switch from classic widget to the new messaging widget without turning it on on production, so we can test and adjust its look and make sure hiding/showing it works as expected, that it doesn't cover any website buttons, etc? Or is that only available with the "sandbox" feature on the most expensive Suite Enterprise (we currently have Suite Professional)? Thank you.
Same question as @..., what is the status for supporting javascript for messaging? We would like to hide the web channel for certain pages on our website. This was possible with the classic web widget, and unfortunately, this didn't work when enabling messaging.
This means that we cannot go further with messaging, while we are so excited to use this. It makes the application unuseful. I hope that you have a solution soon!
@... and @... I have the same issue, and I managed to make it show/hide by calling these lines:
Hope it helps!
@... by setting cookies?? :confused:
We actually contacted support and they told us showing/hiding the new messenger widget using the new web sdk is not yet possible, just opening/closing it (I assume that means the widget icon is always visible, you can just open/close its popup chat window via JS)...
@... Maybe the zendesk team can explain it why setting cookies is needed, although I can't find any cookie being added/updated once I run this command.
Give it a try in the browser console and see if you can get some results.
I had exact same issue as you did, needed to hide/show the widget within specific routes, and this was the only thing that actually worked for me.
Here's the link where I got this info.
If you disallow cookies, it will hide the chat. Once you re-enable them, the chat will appear again.
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/zendesk-sdks/sdks/web/sdk_api_reference/
I have a similar problem with this new version. After an end user completes the contact wizard (in passing, the option to load data into a wizard is awful), there is no way for the flow to restart again. The only option they told me is to close the browser window and go back in. (When I said that to our client, I almost had to pay him to accept Zendesk as a product to manage his help desk).
Eternally the widget stays in that position. Rain dance through or dance with wolves is the same, I have no way of restarting or restarting the chat (as if you do it here with the Start Over button)
Beyond the lyric as a joke, the reality is that I do not know what to respond to the client, it is clear that closing the tab, restarting your browser or asking you to delete your cookies I cannot tell you (was the answer that they gave me in the Zendesk support ).
Do you know of any other way to force the chat restart after loading the contact form data?
Thank you very much in advance.
Hi all,
Is there any way to have the full name and email address prefilled?
We use this behind an authenticated page and have all this information handy. Previous SDKs supported this.
If not, is there plans to have this added soon? It's a bit a show stopper for us.
Cheers
Hi @... and @... (you asked the same question),
Is there a way to provide any user specific data to the web chat widget? I would like to be able to at a minimum initialize it with the user id or perhaps the email address we have on file.
Unfortunately, not as yet but this capability will be available when we introduce JWT authentication within the messaging experience. This is currently on the roadmap and we have plans to deliver it before the end of the year.
- Miranda.
How can we disable the default launcher so we can customize it completely? We've found that no matter where we put these sorts of things, they tend to get in the way, so we designed one that fits better in our UI.
With the old Web Widget we use zE("webWidget", "hide") to hide the launcher entirely, and when our custom launcher is clicked we do zE("webWidget", "show") and zE("webWidget", "open") to open the widget. We set a callback with zE("webWidget:on", "close", ...) to do zE("webWidget", "hide") to keep the default launcher hidden when the widget is closed again. We also listen for the "chat:unreadMessages" event to show a notification indicator if a message is received while the widget is closed.
From the comments above it looks like show/hide aren't available yet, but we won't be able to adopt web messaging until there's a way to replace the default launcher and get a callback when unread messages are available.
Hi everyone,
I am wondering if after moving from the classic Web Widget to the new Web Messaging Channel we can still use the customization settings we used to use. Specifically I would still like to set the color and offset as defined here https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/widget/settings/#color
I gave it an initial try and they are not working. Is there any documentation on how to do it with the new Web Messaging Channel? any way to customize the look of the widget button and window as we could do before?
@...
Is there a way to follow updates to Messaging so we know when some of these crucial features are rolled out. The deal breaker for me currently is the requirement to have the customer fill in their contact info vs. prefilling with data we already have in the system. It'd be great to know when the feature is available.
Hi @...,
Thanks for your message!
Unfortunately, the colour and offset APIs that are available within Web Widget (Classic) are not available within messaging as this stage. Out of interest, what colour settings are you looking to modify within messaging? You can now choose a primary, message & action colour within Admin for messaging so there are more options there (no APIs required).
These are the Web Widget APIs that we have available within messaging today. We are planning to incrementally build out more over time based on customer feedback.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
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