Configure Chat for your Gorgias helpdeskUpdated an hour ago
If you’d like to give your shoppers a real-time way to connect with a support agent, you can set up live chat to allow shoppers to chat with your team without navigating away from your store. Once you’ve set up Chat, you can install the widget to pages on your store to give shoppers a chance to connect with support no matter where they are in their shopping journey. If you have an AI Agent subscription, you can also set up a variety of AI and automation features to enhance the Chat experience for your shoppers, and resolve support tickets without human intervention.
Requirements
- Live Chat is available on all plans. Live Chat automation features are only available with the AI Agent subscription.
- Live Chat must be configured by an Admin.
- All users (except Observers) can respond to Chat tickets.
Installing Gorgias Chat
When you add a Chat widget to your store or website, your shoppers can initiate a real-time conversation with your support team. Each conversation, including those handled by AI Agent or an automation feature, will open a ticket in your helpdesk for agents to review and respond to, or close.
Once you’ve installed Chat, you can optimize it with additional Gorgias features like Flows, Order Management, and AI Agent, and customize it with multi-language support, online and offline hours, dynamic wait times, and more. If you manage multiple stores in Gorgias, you can repeat the steps below to configure and install a separate Chat integration for each store, allowing you to customize each integration to suit each store’s requirements.
Step 1: Set up the basics
When creating a new Chat integration, you’ll give it a name, set a default language, select the platform where the chat widget should appear, and choose how shoppers can use it.
- From your helpdesk, click the Settings icon in the bottom-left corner.
- In the sidebar, locate Channels, then select Chat.
- In the top-right corner, click Add Chat.
- Enter a title.
- Under Default language, click the drop-down menu, then select a language. To make chat available in additional languages, click + Add More Languages.
- Under Select a platform type, select either Ecommerce platforms or Any other website.
- Click the drop-down menu, then select a store, or skip this step if you chose Any other website.
- Under Choose how to connect with customers, select either Allow live chat messages or Allow only offline capture messages.
- Click Next to continue.
Default language
Gorgias automatically detects a shopper’s preferred language based on their browser settings. If you’ve added multiple languages, the chat widget will display in the shopper’s browser language, provided it matches one of the languages you’ve configured. If the browser language can’t be detected or isn’t one of your configured options, the chat widget will display in the language you selected as the default.
Platform type
Gorgias Chat can be connected to a store, or a third-party website. For example, your store might be hosted on Shopify, while your brand’s website is hosted on a third-party tool. You can display the chat widget on your brand’s website by selecting Any other website and following the manual installation instructions.
Choose how to connect with customers
To allow real-time conversations, choose Allow live chat messages. If you choose Allow only offline capture messages, shoppers will be automatically prompted to provide information over the Chat interface, but it will create an email ticket in your helpdesk. When an agent replies, the shopper will receive the response at the email address they provided.
Step 2: Customize your chat
Once you’ve created the integration, you can change the appearance of the chat widget to match your brand’s look and feel.
- Select a Main color and a Conversation color. If you don’t see a color you like, enter a hex code to select a custom color.
- To decide how the widget appears to shoppers on your store or website, select either Icon or Icon and label, then enter a custom label.
- Preview the chat widget’s appearance on the right-hand side of the page.
- Click Next to continue.
Step 3: AI Agent
If you have the AI Agent add-on, you can enable the Order Management feature without leaving the Chat setup. Order Management is only available for Shopify stores, so if you’re configuring Chat for another ecommerce platform or website, you can skip ahead to Step 4: Install and launch.
- From the drop-down menu, select your store. This should be the same store you connected earlier.
- Click the toggle next to Allow customers to track orders from my chat to ON. You can always change this later.
- Click Next to continue.
Step 4: Install and launch
Install the Chat widget on your store or website to make it available to shoppers. If you have a Shopify store, use the Quick installation for Shopify option to install the Chat widget to every page on your store. Otherwise, use the Manual installation option to install the widget on individual Shopify store pages, on Shopify Headless stores, other stores or websites, or using Google Tag Manager. If your store or website uses strict content security policies, you may need to add domains to your allowlist to ensure the Chat widget is visible and operable.
Quick installation
- Under Installation method, select Quick installation for Shopify.
- Click Install.
- Click See Chat Settings, then proceed to Step 5: Configure Chat preferences.
Manual installation
- Under Installation method, select Manual installation.
- Click Install Manually.
- Click See Instructions.
- Under Installation Method, select Manual installation to expand the section.
- Select your website type — either Shopify Website, Any Other Website, or Google Tag Manager.
- Follow the instructions provided.
- Visit your store or website, reload the page to verify that the Chat widget appears, then return to Gorgias to continue the setup.
Installation status
Once you've completed either the Quick or Manual installation, Gorgias will update the status of the widget (found at Settings > Channels > Chat) to either Installed or Not Installed. Gorgias uses web traffic to inform the status of the installation, so if there hasn't been any visitors to the pages where your widget is installed in the past 72 hours, you might see a Not Installed status in your helpdesk. To resolve this, navigate to a page on your store or website where the Chat widget is installed, then reload the page.
Step 5: Configure Chat preferences
Adjust the preferences to determine when Chat is available, how shoppers interact with it, its visibility, and more. Once you’ve adjusted your preferences, click Save Changes to confirm.
Live Chat
Choose from the options below to dictate when shoppers will be able to initiate a chat conversation with your support team. Learn more.
| Live when agents are available | Shoppers can only initiate a new live-chat conversation if there are agents in your helpdesk who haven’t reached their capacity limit. |
| Always live during business hours | Shoppers can initiate a new live-chat conversation at any time during business hours. New chat tickets will open in your helpdesk for an agent to respond to once they’re available. |
| Offline | Shoppers can fill out an offline capture form with their inquiry, and your agents can respond asynchronously. A new email ticket will open in your helpdesk when an offline capture form is submitted. |
Require automated interaction
If you’d prefer, you can set up your Chat widget to only allow shoppers to interact with Automation Features, like Flows or Order Management, rather than create tickets for agents to respond to. To do this, click the toggle next to Remove “Send us a message” button to ON. Either Flows or Order Management needs to be configured in order for this setting to apply. If you’ve switched the toggle to ON but haven’t configured any automation features, the Send us a message button will remain available. Learn more.
Visibility options
Once installed, you choose from the options below to manage when the chat widget appears on your store or website. Learn more.
| Hide chat | When toggled ON, the Chat widget will not appear to shoppers. You might use this setting if you have a higher volume of incoming chats than agents available to respond to them. |
| Hide outside of business hours | When toggled ON, the Chat will not appear to shoppers outside of your specified business hours. Shoppers who have initiated a chat before the end of business hours will see an inline warning that it will soon be unavailable. |
| Hide on mobile | When toggled ON, the Chat widget will only be available to shoppers on desktop. |
| Display campaigns when chat is hidden | If you’ve configured campaigns to display through the Chat widget, you can ensure they display even when the widget is hidden by toggling this setting to ON. |
Email capture
You can enable email capture If you’d like your shoppers to provide their email address in order to initiate a chat. Collecting the shopper’s email allows you to send follow up messages if the chat ends unexpectedly, and helps you grow your email marketing list. If you toggle this setting to ON, you can also choose to make it optional or required. Learn more.
Auto-reply with wait time
Gorgias can send shoppers an automated message letting them know when they can expect a reply from a support agent. When this setting is toggled ON, if an agent doesn’t respond to a new chat within 30 seconds, the shopper is sent a message indicating they’ll get a response either in a few minutes or in a few hours, or a dynamic wait time estimate based on your recent chat response times.
Privacy policy disclaimer
If you’re required to inform your shoppers of their consent to your privacy policy, you can toggle this setting to ON to display a custom disclaimer message in the chat widget. Learn more.
Connect email
Connecting an email address to your Chat integration allows you to automatically send shoppers conversation transcripts, offline capture confirmation emails, and satisfaction surveys when the chat ends. Click the dropdown menu to select which address these emails should come from. If you don’t see the address you’re looking for, connect it either by setting up a direct email integration (Basic and Pro plans), or automatic email forwarding (Advanced and Enterprise plans).
Next steps
Customize
- To learn how to customize the Chat widget for each language you’ve applied, visit Edit Chat copy and translations.
- If you’d like to further customize the appearance of the chat widget, visit our resource on Customizing the Chat appearance.
- On Shopify stores, you can also add Chat to your Checkout and Thank You pages.
- If you set up multiple languages for Chat, learn more about managing multiple languages on Chat.
- Our Offline capture article offers a complete overview of the offline capture feature and its customizations.
Optimize
- To automatically send a transcript of the conversation when the chat ends, learn how to enable Chat Transcripts.
- Learn about automating your support processes with Flows, Order Management and AI Agent.
- You can also use the chat widget to drive conversions by setting up campaigns and with AI Agent’s shopping assistant features.
