This article describes advantages of using the overlay chat widget and how to turn it on.
Understanding the advantages of the overlay chat widget
Here are some of the key advantages of the overlay chat widget.
Start a conversation faster
The overlay widget lets the visitor remain in the tab they were using. The widget also loads 2-3x faster (depending on network speeds).
Giving a customer the ability to send attachments like photos or screenshots of an error can be incredibly useful when trying to understand their situation and provide help. The overlay option lets visitors start a conversation by sending an attachment.
Better understand your mobile visitors
Understanding where your visitors have been and where they are going during a chat conversation can help the agent understand what the visitor has tried and what they are looking at now. The overlay widget lets agents get the full visitor path tracking just like what they are used to for desktop visitors.
If you have Google Analytics on your website, you can take advantage of the events inside Google Analytics to better understand your desktop visitor’s actions. The overlay widgets lets you track those same events for mobile visitors as well. This will ensure that the numbers in Google Analytics are more accurate and captures all visitor events, regardless of what device or platform they are using.
Maintain your brand on mobile
The overlay widget ensures your website visitors always remain on your site and domain, even while chatting.
Zendesk Chat offers a comprehensive Javascript API that allows for more customization of the widget experience. The overlay widget ensures that the mobile widget reacts to all of the APIs the same way it does on the desktop widget.
A better mobile chat experience
To ensure the mobile overlay widget feels as native to the phone as possible, there are a number of other smaller tweaks
- Preventing the keyboard from jumping around when the visitor is typing
- Smoother chat log support and reduced jumping when a new message is received.
- Ensuring that the keyboard stays open after the visitor hits ‘Send’ so they don’t have to keep tapping on the text input field when they want to send multiple messages.
- Ensuring that the text input field is always accessible even as the visitor scrolls up the chat log to review previous messages.
Works with Zendesk Support
If you use Chat with the Zendesk Web Widget, all the benefits mentioned earlier also applies to you!
Having the mobile overlay widget enabled allows Support tickets created from Chat to include the mobile visitor’s URL. This is important if you use triggers in Support that looks for a specific URL in the ticket, for example, when assigning tickets to the correct brand.
Turning on the overlay chat widget
You can turn on the overlay option through the Widget settings inside the Chat dashboard, and select the Appearance tab.
Under the Chat Window section, click on the “Overlay Window” toggle for the ‘Mobile Widget’ setting and click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of the page.
2 comments
Grifon Brasil
The option "Overlay Window" is not available on my administration page.
Its show very small on mobile devices, I need your help to fix it.
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Christine Diego
If you are currently using messaging, some of the chat dashboard settings are no longer available, you can check this article for details Why are some settings missing on the Chat dashboard for live-chat?
I would suggest to please open a ticket with our Support team so we can investigate specifics with your account. You can follow the steps here.
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