Why are my customers being served articles instead of a chat?

Question

When users want to access our chat they run into a "Help" panel and receive articles from our help center instead of having the option to chat with our support team.

How can I disable this?

Answer

Why this happens

The Web Widget (Classic) has two self-service tools that you can enable to encourage your customers to use your help center resources before being connected with an agent. If your customers are encountering a search bar or article recommendations then one or both of these settings is enabled.

The first setting is called Help Center and embeds a search bar in your widget. Customers must search for an answer in your help center before being connected with an agent if this setting is enabled. After entering a query, the option to select Live Chat will appear to connect your customers with an agent.

The second setting is called Contextual Help and becomes available after enabling Help Center. This setting will proactively serve your customers articles based on the webpage they're on. It appears as a list of pre-populated articles when your customer loads the widget. They'll still be required to perform a search in order to access Live chat if these articles are unhelpful. For more information on this setting, see the article: About Contextual Help for the Web Widget (Classic). 

Disabling Help Center search and Contextual Help

Both settings can be disabled in Admin Center so that your customers can be directly connected to an agent upon loading the widget. 

In Admin Center, click the Channels icon () in the sidebar, then select Classic > Web Widget.
Toggle Help Center off to disable both features or toggle Contextual Help to just remove automatic article suggestions.

For more information on these and other widget settings, see the article: Configuring components of Web Widget (Classic).