Settings

Live Chat

Set up the live chat widget for your website and client portal: appearance, visitor access, allowed domains, and how chats reach your staff as tickets.

Updated · 2026-09-03

What live chat does

Live chat puts a small chat bubble in the corner of your own website. A visitor clicks it, types a question, and the conversation lands in your admin panel as a support ticket that your staff answer in real time. You do not run a second inbox: every chat is a ticket, in the same queue, with the same departments, the same staff and the same history as email and portal tickets.

The widget is a single script tag you paste into your site. Everything about how it looks and behaves — colour, corner, wording, who may start a chat, which department picks it up — is controlled from the Live Chat settings tab, so you never edit your website again after the first install.

How to reach it

In the admin panel go to Settings, then open the Communication group and click Live Chat. It sits next to Tickets and Email.

Turning it on

The first card on the page holds a single switch, Enable Live Chat (“Turn the live chat widget on or off across your site”).

This switch saves itself. Unlike the rest of the page, flipping Enable Live Chat writes the change immediately — and it takes any unsaved edits in the Allowed website domains box with it, so a domain you have just typed is not lost. Every other field on this page waits for the Save button.

While the switch is off, the widget script still loads on your site but renders nothing at all. Visitors see no bubble and no error.

The layout of the page

Below the enable card the page splits in two. On the left is the settings form, in four sections: Appearance, Behavior, Visitor access and Security, with a Save button at the bottom. On the right is a live Preview — a working mock-up of the chat panel that redraws as you type, showing your colour, title, subtitle, online pill, welcome message and sample bubbles. The preview follows your unsaved changes, so use it to judge wording and contrast before committing.

A small Unsaved changes note appears next to the Save button as soon as you edit anything.

Appearance

Theme color: The accent colour of the chat header, the visitor's own message bubbles and the send button. Pick it with the colour swatch or type a hex value such as #2563eb into the field beside it.
Widget position: Which corner the bubble sits in: Bottom right (the default), Bottom left, Top right or Top left.
Chat title: The heading inside the chat panel, for example Chat with us.
Subtitle: The smaller line under the title. Use it to set expectations, for example We typically reply within minutes.
Welcome message: The first bubble a visitor sees, written as if from your team. In Require login mode this same text is shown above the log-in button instead.
Always show Online: Pins the status pill in the chat header to Online even when no staff member is connected. Leave it off to show the real state.

How the online state is decided: with Always show Online off, the pill reads Online whenever at least one staff member has the admin panel open, and Offline otherwise. Nothing else feeds it — there is no separate rota or business-hours schedule.

Behavior

Show in client panel: Also shows the same widget inside your customer portal, not only on the sites where you pasted the embed code. Off by default.
Auto message: Sends a second, nudging bubble if the visitor has the panel open and has not written anything. When on, two extra fields appear: Auto message text and Auto message delay (seconds). The delay must be between 1 and 600; save with anything outside that and the page refuses with “Auto-message delay must be between 1 and 600 seconds.”
Allow attachments: Shows a paperclip in the visitor's composer. Visitors can attach up to three files per message, each up to 5 MB. Files arrive on the ticket like any other attachment.
Offline message: Wording set aside for when nobody is available. Note that the composer stays open whether you are online or offline — a visitor can always send a message, and it becomes a ticket either way. The status pill in the header is what signals which state you are in.
Department: Which department new chats are filed under. The list shows your active departments; leave it on Default to use your normal routing. If the department you picked is later deleted or deactivated, new chats fall back to default routing rather than failing. See Departments.

Visitor access

Two radio buttons decide who may start a conversation.

Allow guests: Anyone on your website can chat without an account. This is the normal choice for a public site.
Require login: Only signed-in customers may chat. Visitors who are not signed in see your welcome message and a Log in button instead of a composer, and an attempt to start a chat anyway is refused with “Please log in to start a chat.”

With Allow guests selected, a further switch appears:

Require visitor info: Shows a short pre-chat form before the conversation opens. On by default.
Visitor fields: Only shown when the above is on. Choose Name & email or Email only. The email is always validated; with Name & email the name is required too, and the visitor cannot start until both are filled in.

Tip: collect the email. When a guest's address matches an existing active customer, the chat ticket is attached to that customer's account automatically, so your staff see their services and history alongside the conversation instead of an anonymous visitor.

Security

Allowed website domains: A list of the sites that are permitted to run your widget, one domain per line. Subdomains of a listed domain are included. Anything you paste is tidied for you — a full address is reduced to its host, and case and trailing slashes are ignored — so https://Example.com/pricing is stored as example.com.

Leave the box empty and any website in the world can embed your chat. While it is empty the page shows an amber caution: “Anyone can embed your chat on any website. Add your domains to restrict it.” On a site that is not on the list the widget behaves exactly as if live chat were switched off — nothing renders, and an attempt to start a chat from there is refused with “Live chat is not available on this site.”

A blue note in the same section points at the other half of the defence: for a public site, turn on the human-verification challenge in Security settings. With it enabled, a visitor must clear the challenge before their first chat message is accepted.

Putting the widget on your website

The bottom card, Embed code, contains a ready-made snippet already pointing at your own installation, with a copy button. Copy it from there rather than typing it — the address is specific to you.

Copy the snippet from the Embed code card.
Paste it into your website's HTML immediately before the closing </body> tag. One page or a shared template, on as many sites as you like.
Add each of those sites to Allowed website domains and click Save.
Reload the site. The bubble appears in the corner you chose.

You never need to touch that snippet again. Colour, wording, position, access mode and department are all read from these settings each time the widget loads, so changes here reach every site the moment you save.

Note: to show the same widget to signed-in customers inside your portal, you do not paste anything. Switch on Show in client panel and save.

What the visitor experiences

A bubble in the chosen corner. Opening it shows the header with your title, subtitle and the Online or Offline pill.
If you require visitor info, a short form asking for name and/or email with a Start chat button. Errors are shown inline (“Please enter a valid email.”).
Your welcome message as the first bubble, followed by the auto message after the delay if the visitor has not typed.
Their messages in your theme colour, staff replies on the left with your company logo as the agent avatar (a generic glyph if you have not uploaded one).
A paperclip for attachments if you allow them, and a mute control for the incoming-message sound.
An unread count on the bubble when a reply arrives while the panel is closed.
The conversation is remembered in their browser, so navigating your site or returning later reopens the same chat.
When the chat ends, the composer locks and a banner reads “This chat has ended.” with a Start new chat button.

What your staff see

Every conversation becomes a ticket. Nothing extra needs to be enabled and there is no separate chat console.

The ticket is created with the subject Live Chat, status Open, priority Medium, and is tagged with a Chat badge in the ticket list and on the ticket itself.
The guest's name and email are recorded on the ticket. If the email matches an active customer, the ticket is linked to that account.
On an open chat ticket, a presence indicator next to the Chat badge shows whether the visitor is currently Online or Offline.
Replies are sent from the normal ticket reply box and reach the visitor instantly. Staff hear a chime for messages they did not write.
When the visitor closes the conversation or disconnects, the reply box is disabled and the ticket shows “Visitor disconnected — this chat has ended.” The ticket and its transcript remain, and you can still close it in the usual way.

See Tickets and Ticket Details for the reply tools, internal notes and status handling that apply to chat tickets as to any other.

Note: a chat that no staff member ever answered is closed automatically three days after it was started. Nothing is deleted — the ticket and every message stay, they are simply moved to Closed so an unanswered spam chat does not sit in your queue for ever. Conversations that received at least one staff reply are never touched.

Field reference

Live Chat settings and what each control does
Field	What it does
Enable Live Chat	Main switch for the widget on every site. Saves immediately.
Theme color	Accent colour for the header, visitor bubbles and the send button.
Widget position	Corner the bubble sits in: bottom right, bottom left, top right or top left.
Chat title	Heading shown in the chat panel.
Subtitle	Secondary line under the title.
Welcome message	First bubble the visitor sees; also the prompt shown in require-login mode.
Always show Online	Pins the status pill to Online regardless of who is connected.
Show in client panel	Also displays the widget inside your customer portal.
Auto message	Sends a follow-up bubble to a visitor who has not typed.
Auto message text	Wording of that follow-up bubble.
Auto message delay (seconds)	How long to wait first. Must be 1–600.
Allow attachments	Lets visitors attach files — up to three per message, 5 MB each.
Offline message	Out-of-hours wording held with the widget's settings. The composer stays open in both states; the pill signals which one you are in.
Department	Department new chat tickets are filed under. Default uses normal routing.
Visitor access	Allow guests or Require login.
Require visitor info	Shows a pre-chat form in guest mode.
Visitor fields	Name & email or Email only on that form.
Allowed website domains	Sites permitted to run the widget, one per line, subdomains included. Empty means any site.
Save	Commits every field except the enable switch, which has already saved itself.

What can go wrong

The bubble does not appear on my site: Check three things in order: the Enable Live Chat switch is on; the site's domain is in Allowed website domains (or the box is empty); and the snippet really is in the page you are looking at, before the closing body tag. A site that is not allowed renders nothing at all rather than an error, which is easy to mistake for a broken install.
“Live chat is not available on this site.”: The visitor's site is not on the allowed list. Add the domain and save.
“Please log in to start a chat.”: Visitor access is set to Require login and the visitor is not signed in. Switch to Allow guests if you want anonymous chats.
“Too many chats started from your network. Please try again later.”: A protective limit on new conversations from one address — roughly ten new chats in a fifteen-minute window, with a separate, higher allowance for messages inside an existing chat. Visitors sharing an office connection share that allowance. Turning on the human-verification challenge in Security settings is the better answer to automated spam.
The pill says Offline while my team is working: The state follows staff who currently have the admin panel open. If your team works from ticket email alerts rather than the panel, switch on Always show Online.
Chats are landing in the wrong queue: Set the Department field. If it is already set, confirm that department is still active.
A save is rejected: The only field this page validates on its own is the auto-message delay. Bring it inside 1–600 seconds and save again.

Tickets · Ticket Details · Ticket Settings · Departments · Security · Getting Support · Domain Search Widget

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