Live Chat in GFI HelpDesk
Providing real-time support to your customers is a critical part of a good support strategy.The GFI HelpDesk's Live Chat features enable your team to provide fast and friendly help to your customers from your support center, as well as any website you choose.
Live chat in GFI HelpDesk has a variety of moving pieces. This article provides information on how those pieces interact and how you can get all of them working to provide a seamless live chat experience for your staff and customers.
There are two sides to GFI HelpDesk's live chat functionality:
- Staff-facing: To receive and respond to customer chats, your staff or agents need two things:
- To belong to a Live Support department. If you need help creating a new department or assigning staff to a department, refer to the topic Organizing Your Support Requests into Departments.
- To be running Kayako Desktop, our desktop application for handling customer chats. Learn all about Kayako Desktop in our installation guide and in our articles on how to use Kayako Desktop for Windows and Kayako Desktop for Mac.
- Customer-facing: To allow your customers to send your team live chat messages, enable the live chat button on your support center by ensuring that you have one or more agents signed in to the Kayako Desktop. You also have the option of adding a button to any external website from which you want to offer real-time support. You can choose from a variety of styles for your live chat buttons.
Once you set both sides up, your customers see a button like this, which they can click on to start a new chat with your support team. When a customer clicks the live chat button, they are asked to fill in a form with their details, including their name, email, and what they are looking for help with.
You can also add custom fields to your chat form to capture additional information from customers before they start a chat. For further details, see custom fields.
Once the customer submits their details, the chat request is sent to an available team member via Kayako Desktop. When the agent accepts the offer, they can talk to the customer directly and resolve their issue.
You can customize the header of your live chat window with your company logo by editing one of the live chat templates.
A complete record of the conversation is saved in the Chat History log, which you can reach via the staff control panel.
Live chat button
For your support center, a live chat button is available by default. It switches to Online as soon as one or more of your agents install Kayako Desktop and sign in. You can remove or customize your support center button by editing your templates.
For other websites, the admin control panel includes an option to generate a customized block of code, which you can add to your site. You have the choice to create the code for a button, a badge, or a plain-text link.