Close/End Chat button

Hi Glenn,

Thank you for taking the time to post in our Product Feedback Forum.  In order to best respond to your request, I'd like to clarify a few points and offer a suggestion.  First, are your customers seeing the minimize chat button in the upper right corner of the widget?  They can use that to remove the conversation without having to enter into the options menu.

Have your customers expressed the need to immediately end the chat rather than minimize it?  I am wondering what exactly is the flow that your customers are following and if we have a current method that can accommodate their needs.

Sincerely,
James Peterson

+1

While we've only been on Zopim for a week, I've personally seen at least 4 customers ask me "how do I close this thing".

There should be a nice, big, fat "End Chat" button that's not buried under a click.

Customers can't find close button and this makes our live support team crazy. We are a very crowded website, please add X(CLOSE) on the main chat view.

Hi David, thanks for sharing feedback.

The chat widget is designed to be always there as online companion to allow customer to reach out to support agents as and when needed. As of now we do not have a feature to allow prominent close button.

Thanks, Harish

+1 on the prominent "close" button. It's a common UI feature found on the web. I've included a screenshot of a competitor for reference.

Thank you

This is a big loss for a company like zopim. Think about our request again please.

Hello! 

We are beginning our chat rollout in 2 weeks at our very large organization and anticipate that the hidden "end chat" button will be problematic for us. 

I will keep the team posted - our chat volume is very high and we intend to grow chat as our main communication channel.

Hi Christina,

Thanks for the feedback and please monitor the impact of not having the end chat button visible to the customer on your workflow as you scale chat up in your organization. You may also want to share this feedback with your account manager.

There are no immediate plans to add a close button to the top nav in the next two quarters but there are two options you can look at doing now using our Javascript API:

1. Add custom close button to the widget that uses the endChat API to end the chat session.

2. End the chat based on a set amount of inactivity time using the endChat API and some custom code.

Thanks,

Ramin

Hi Ramin, 

Thanks for your response.

Are you aware of other customers who have been successful in adding a custom close button? 

I approached our development team with your response and we are not able to add a custom close button because there is no way to add arbitrary HTML to the chat window. 

Hi Cristina,

I will reach out to you via a ticket regarding examples.

Thanks,

Ramin

We have been a Zopim customer for a year now, and this has come up on different occasions. The close chat seems to be hidden under Options. Is there a way to add the x close window button on top that will do the same? Users are used to seeing that in browser windows.

Can you share the script for adding a custom button to invoke the API? Thanks.

Hi Nari,

The code is much more complicated that invoking the JS API and is a workaround, is not officially supported by us.

If you are okay with the risk and having to support it yourself, you will need to both inject the iframe to add a close button and use the JS APIs mentioned earlier to end the chat on button click.

Are you getting customers commenting that they don't know how to close the chat after the conversation has ended? Or you worried that chat conversions are not ending 'on time'? 

-Ramin

Hi Ramin,

More to do with customers rather than analytics re when chat 'ends'.

The option that you are outlining might not be viable since we would prefer not to inject iframes for security reasons. Would like to still see what you are recommending and determine whether this would even work for us.

Given the number of folks who have requested this and there not being an official workaround, I am surprised this is not on the feature list for more than  year.

Cheers,

Nari

Hi Nari,

Thanks for the feedback. So to be clear, customers are sending messages post chat to you or your agents asking how to end the chat?

If you are not comfortable with the iframe injection method you can potentially look at another workaround using the JS APIs:

1. Use isChatting to see if there is an active chat conversion going on
2. use the window.onHide callback API to trigger a dialog to ask the customer if they want to end the chat or minimise 
3. If they select 'end chat', use the endChat API to end the chat session. 

We are actively looking into this issue in conjunction with more widget customization options. Nothing to announce just yet, but will notify you if/when more options become available. 

Thanks,
Ramin

We have had multiple customers ask for this feature to be more visible also. 

Hi,

There is a big difference between minimize the chat and close it, if it is only minimized, chat is still active and it will interfere on the queue waiting time.

I understand the zopim team point of view regarding service, but different companies have different public, products and needs, therefore to provide the companies at least with the option of having the close/end chat button on chat window or not would be a very good idea.

The workaround I saw is way too complicated, I am surprised as pretty much all products (live chats) I have worked with on the last 9 years they all had a close button it seems the most basic feature to have.

Right now, We saw our selves in a position of having to finish chats with instructions on how to close it, what is far from ideal.

I hope zopim team will take our requests in consideration soon.

Thanks very much,

Regards,

I agree with Maisa on this one. This has caused frustration on our side as well

We are a very busy customer service and without a big fat "end chat" button, chats durations and agent availability will be heavily affected.

We are starting Zopim chat rollout next week, and I am very concerned about the incredible little visibility that is given to the "end chat button" from the customer prospective. We use chat screen pop out in our case, so the minimise button is not even an option. Where the "end button" is now places, I am afraid this is made on purpose not to be seen by the customer.

Behaviour I imagine should be like this:

- Customer doesn't have further questions for the agent.

- Customer terminates the chat

- Customer leaves satisfaction rating and comment

- Chat window closes

Also I don't understand the behaviour of the "end chat" on the agent side. 

We also need the "end chat" button a little bit bigger, especially because the chats are limited per agent. 

Hello,

we are a Zendesk Premium Partner for Brazil and this is a need for customer services teams we are working with. As we have a big volume of contacts everyday, the end chat button will help our SLA´s. When there´s nothing left to do with the chat, the customer always thinks it´s possible to rank the customer service level and end the conversation. I believe what Zendesk Chat promises is very disruptive and some customers understand, but people in general do not understand it clearly. 

Ramin, My suggestion is to insert this option in the account settings, and you will see how much Chat customers will work with one or other way. 

The thing is that maybe a sales team will likely use the regular option to increase sales, but the customer service team will prefer the end chat.

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for your feedback. We have no intention to add a close button to the standalone widget in the next 6 months.

If this is a priority for you, you can use the Web SDK (beta) as a Premium customer to build a custom widget that has a more prominent close button. You can get more info here: https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/228296807-Beta-Zopim-Web-SDK-Full-Widget-Customization-

Thanks,

Ramin

Ramin, 

In all your responses you are not listening to any of your customers.  You clearly believe from a product perspective you are making the best choice for the customers.  I suggest you look more closely at the use cases and consider this request.  We have many curious customers who click on LIVE CHAT just to see what it looks like then want to "go back a page" to where they can self-serve (as you promote) and use the help center instead.  By not allowing this (unless they completely reload the browser), you are creating a very negative experience for the customers and more steps to get the answers/help they need.  There needs to be an option to cancel the chat request before it even starts or end the chat easily without jumping through hoops.  I don't care about real estate on the widget.  it doesn't take up that much space.

I also suggest to have prominent end chat on web, app and mobile-site. Customer is king and if he feels telling hosting company that I have ended chat or don't want to chat - he should be allowed to do so and also hosting client should honor.

Just adding out vote. Sorry, but the chat minimize-button that locks the widget instead of resetting it and closing chat is super confusing. 

Not only is it confusing, but the customer is left in that chat and if they click "Help" again, they are put directly into that chat screen and not prompted for a subject.  The initial prompt for a topic is how we hope to deflect issues and send customers to our Help Center.

Right now we use a product that is not integrated with our Help Center, however this isn't any better if, after the first chat, our customers can't get back to the initial prompt screen.

Just like Jenn said, the current behavior does not play well when Zendesk Chat is served through the Zendesk Web Widget. 

Hi,

Just like the people that commented before, I find it quite incredibly that this isn't a standard feature with Zendesk chat. We have limited chats for our agents. Having a small support team, but a fair amount of demand, this can cause serious problems for us. If 3 French speaking customers don't close the chat properly, we won't have any more French support, so not exactly an idea situation.

Our developers are also quite busy creating new features for our product, so creating a custom button as Zendesk suggests, is just not feasible. I'm sorry to say, but this is Zendesk's job. You have your feedback, with multiple clients saying this is a problem. The creation of an option to have an end button shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Paul

Yes please! If it could have a separate buttons, and possible make the options button smaller, and possibly a gear (to save size) that would be really helpful.

We've had quite a few customer complaints on how the options button is too small. Our agents already have to use a textexpander in addition to what they usually do to close out chat to let the user know where to go to end the chat. This would save our agents and our users time. 

In addition to not being able to find the button, sometimes the user end just gets left open for ages, cause they don't see our message and don't end the chat. Sometimes they'll reply with a Thanks! after no one has been in chat with them, and this opens up an entire new case. 

Please add a close button to the UI for end users. The current option is never found by end users and causes chat sessions to drag for much longer than they need to, tying up valuable agent resources. 

Please don't refer us to the Web SDK or custom code. This is a simple fix to your UI/UX. Web users understand the difference between minimize and close functionality.

Thank you for reading