You can customize the Chat widget according to the brand where it is embedded, and manage all of the tickets within your primary instance of Zendesk Support. Having a single Chat account embedded on multiple sites for your agents to work from can help increase efficiency and save on administrative tasks.
This article assumes you have multiple brands, Zendesk Chat, and branded help centers.
This article contains the following sections:
Configuring Zendesk Support
A widget with chat enabled for each brand should be created -- this is especially helpful if you'd like to shepherd your users to a Help Center search before leaving a message. It is possible to forego the use of the Zendesk Support widget and just embed the Zendesk Chat widget on your sites, but you will lose some really useful functionality (Help Center searches before chat/ticket submission, brand placement on ticket creation).
Triggers
While requests made via the Web Widget contact form will automatically create the ticket under the appropriate brand, chats do not currently recognize the brands they're installed on. So, we need to tell Zendesk Chat which brand each should be associated with! We do this by keying off the user agent string passed through in each ticket via internal comment.
Since all requests originating from that brand will have the subdomain as part of the URL, our trigger is light weight and automatically routes the chat request to the appropriate brand.
I won't go into the full details of modifying notifications as they differ depending on the needs of the company, but as it stands when tickets are created via chat they will fire off the "Notify Requester and CCs of Received Request" default trigger. That notification will appear as coming from the default brand support address. To prevent those notifications from sending out to chat-created tickets, you can add a condition to the "Notify Requester and CCs of Received Request" trigger where Channel is not chat . You would then be free to create new triggers where Channel is chat to send follow-up notifications.
Branding the widget
The Web Widget code is embedded in the <head> section of your Help Center (or external page). Any sort of modifications to the web widget itself can be done through the Embeddables API , but the primary modifications needed are through the Chat API .
Here's an example of the same Zendesk Chat instance with widgets branded for different purposes:
In these examples, I have filtered the departments available, changed the concierge avatar image/name, varied the prechat form greeting, and set a new title for the chat window.
To do this, use the window.zESettings object, which is loaded when the widget starts. For more information, see Quickstart - Web Widget APIs.
<script type="text/javascript">
window.zESettings = {
webWidget: {
chat: {
departments: {
enabled: ['Haven Hobbies Support', 'Haven Hobbies Sales']
}
prechatForm: {
greeting: {
'*': 'Need a new hobby? We've got your hobbies right here!'
}
}
title: {
'*': 'Helley's Haven Hobbies'
}
}
concierge: {
avatarPath: 'Image URL',
name: 'Helley Haven',
title: { '*': 'Hierophant Hobbyist' }
}
};
</script>