HF PanelDocsv1.0.0

Live chat

Answer customers and website visitors in real time, with unread badges, a sound, canned replies, opening hours and offline tickets.

With Live chat your customers talk to you from their Control Panel, and visitors from your website. You answer from the chat inbox. When nobody is online, a customer's message becomes a support ticket instead.

Where: Server Admin › Support › Live chat (resellers: Reseller Panel › Support › Live chat)

Each conversation belongs to the customer's host: the administrators answer their own customers and website visitors, a reseller answers only their own customers. All administrator logins share the administrators' inbox, read-only staff logins included.

Know when a customer is waiting

  • The menu entry shows how many chats need an answer, for example Live chat (2): chats nobody has taken yet and chats with messages you have not read.
  • The chat icon in the top bar shows the same number on every page.
  • A new customer message plays a short sound. Click Sound on on the Live chat screen to switch it off (Sound off); the choice is kept in this browser.
  • Click Desktop notifications to let the browser show a notification when a message arrives while the panel's tab is in the background.

Online and away

You count as online while the panel is open in a browser tab (any page) and your status is Available. Choose Away in the status menu at the top of the Live chat screen when you step away: customers then see Agent is offline and their messages become tickets. Closing the panel makes you offline within about a minute.

The line under the heading tells you how customers see you right now.

Answer a chat

  1. Choose a tab: Open (waiting and active, the default), Waiting, Active, Closed or All. Each chat shows the customer, the last message, a red number for unread messages and its status.
  2. Click a chat. Its messages appear in the middle; the customer's details on the right.
  3. Type your answer and press Enter or click Send. A waiting chat becomes Active and yours.
Button What it does
Assign to me Takes the chat: it becomes active and the customer sees "… joined the chat".
Convert to ticket Turns the chat into a support ticket for the customer, with the whole conversation in it, and closes the chat.
Close Ends the chat. The customer sees "The chat was closed." and can start a new one.

While the customer types you see Customer is typing…; they see Support is typing… while you do.

The customer panel shows the account (a link to it in Accounts), email, first domain, package, status, the date it was created, the IP address the chat came from and the ticket the chat became, if any. For a website visitor you see the name and email they typed.

Note: messages are plain text, up to 2,000 characters. Links are made clickable; anything that looks like HTML is shown as text.

Canned replies

Canned replies are ready-made answers, the same list as the saved replies of Support tickets: your own ones and your team's Shared ones. Placeholders such as {customer}, {domain} and {ticket} are filled in for the chat's customer.

  1. Open the Canned replies tab.
  2. Enter a Name and the Text, then click Save. Tick Shared with my team (when you may write shared replies) to share it. Use Edit and Delete to change the replies you may change.

When a chat in which staff answered ends, the customer is asked to rate it.

In a chat, choose one in Insert a canned reply…: it is added to the end of your reply, ready to change and send.

When nobody is online

When no administrator (or, for a reseller's customer, the reseller) is online:

  • a customer's message becomes a support ticket titled "Live chat: …", and you get the usual ticket email. The chat tells the customer the ticket number; later messages in the same chat are added to that ticket.
  • a website visitor's message is emailed to the support address (Settings), with the visitor's email so you can answer them by email. The chat tells the visitor you will answer by email.

Settings

Administrators set up live chat on the Settings tab of the Live chat screen.

Setting What it does
Live chat is on Shows the chat button in the Control Panel and the Live chat screen to customers. On by default.
Greeting The first line customers see. Empty: "Hello! How can we help you today?", in the customer's language.
Only during opening hours Outside the chosen Days, From and To, everyone shows as offline and messages become tickets. The server's time is used.
Chat widget for your website Lets visitors who are not signed in chat with the administrators. Off by default.
Other websites allowed to show the widget Websites, besides the panel's own addresses, that may load the widget, for example example.com, www.example.com.

Add the chat to your website

  1. Tick Chat widget for your website and click Save settings.
  2. Copy the line shown under it, for example <script src="https://panel.yourdomain.com:8443/chat/widget.js" defer></script>, and put it on every page of your website, just before </body>.
  3. If your website is not on one of the panel's own addresses, add its address under Other websites allowed to show the widget.

The widget asks visitors for their name and email the first time, then works like the customer's chat. It shows nothing while the widget is switched off. At most 5 new chats an hour come from one IP address, and 10 messages a minute from one visitor.