Setting up your Gorgias Chat

Updated 1 week ago by Chloe Kesler

Using our chat integration is a great way for your customers and leads to connect with your support team in real time, without the hassle of sending an email and waiting on a reply.

Setup instructions

To add the Gorgias chat widget to your store:

  1. Add a new chat integration by going to Settings → Integrations → Chat. Click '+ Add new'.
  2. The next page will prompt you to let us know if you want the chat widget installed on your Shopify store or on some other type of website. The installation process differs because we have a direct integration with Shopify.
    1. If you are on Shopify, the menu below will prompt you to pick one of the integrated stores to install your chat. There can only be one chat integration per Shopify store.
  1. Choose your chat's name, introduction text, colors, language. Once done simply hit 'Add new chat'.
  2. The next page will be the Installation page for your chat integration where you can see which Shopify store it belongs to now. Below, you will find a Custom installation menu as well, where you can grab the installation code and paste it manually on your store if you want the chat widget visible on certain pages only, for example, or if you want the chat widget installed on some other type of website (store).
Please note that by copying the code to your Shopify theme.liquid files, the chat will also be shown on all web pages. The chat code can be manually pasted only on pages that they you the widget to appear in.
If the chat was installed manually, you can't use the toggle feature to turn it off and on. You can use this feature with a Shopify store installation.
  1. Other than Installation, here you will find the Appearance tab where you can revisit your chat widget's appearance settings.

Under Preferences you can adjust your Email Capture feature, your Auto-Responder during and outside business hours and connect your email integration to the chat as well. More on that below.

The next tab will let you set up your chat Quick Replies. Please check out this guide for more assistance on that.

You can set up Chat Campaigns on the next tab. More on those here.

Lastly, you'll find the Self-Service tab on the far right. We have moved the setup menu to it's own separate page, which you will find by clicking on the green button on this tab or by following the path Settings → Self-Service under 'Automation'.

You are free to add multiple chat integrations. This is especially useful if you are managing several stores from Gorgias.

Setup instructions for Google Tag Manager
  1. In Google Tag Manager, click "Tags" in the menu.
  2. Click "New" to create a new tag.
  3. Search for "Gorgias Chat" and select it.
  4. Enter your Gorgias Chat App ID.
  5. Select "All Pages - Page view" in the Trigger section.
  6. Save and publish.

Chat availability

The chat status will always depend on your business hours settings (under Settings → Business Hours). Outside of business hours, the chat will show in offline mode. During your business hours, the chat will show in online mode.

Note regarding agents' profile images:

- Even if no agents are set as available for chat during business hours, the chat will still be shown in online mode, but their profile picture will have little orange circles. If agents are available, their profile images will be displayed with little green circles.

- In case that you have agents available for chat outside business hours, the chat widget will still be displayed in offline mode and the agent's profile picture will always be displayed with orange circles (regardless of their availability).

Note regarding setting a single picture for the whole team:

This option is only available when updating an existing Chat integration, and not when creating a new Chat integration, for technical reasons. If you want to set a single picture for the whole team on a new Chat integration, please create it without it at first, and then go back to its appearance tab: you will then be able to upload a picture and enable this setting.

Setting yourself as available for chat

You can determine when you're available to chat with customers or not. Please note that this will not affect the overall availability of the chat - this is changed by setting up your business hours.

To set your availability, click on your name at the bottom right, and use the available for chat toggle.

There are 3 ways an agent can appear as unavailable for chat:

  • If the agent marks themselves as not available for chat manually
  • If the agent has closed their Gorgias tab
  • If the agent hasn't been active for more than 10 minutes
When an agent in Gorgias is replying to a chat ticket and the customer still has the chat widget open on their end, the customer will be able to see that the agent is typing their message. However, the agent will not see when a customer is typing a message or if they still have the chat widget open.
If the customer closes the chat widget and misses your message, we will send them the missed messages via email. This event will also be displayed on the ticket in Gorgias, as shown on the screenshot below. Moreover, clicking on the event will highlight the exact messages that were sent in the email.

Auto-responder for Chat

You can set automatic responses that will be sent to your customers outside of your business hours. This is a great way to let your customers know when they can receive a response from your agents.

The auto-responder is not related to the agent's availability, but will instead behave differently depending on whether you are currently within or outside of your business hours.

During business hours auto-response

If a new ticket is created by a customer message and no one answers after 30 seconds, an automatic reply will be sent to the customer, reply which you can choose among 4 options:

Outside business hours auto-response

If a new ticket is created by a customer message, an automatic reply will be instantaneously sent indicating when is the soonest time when agents will be available (based on your business hours)

All those messages are translated into the language used by your integration, which you can now configure on the “overview” or “appearance” page of each of those integrations.

The chat auto-responder will trigger just for currently logged in customers. If the customer is not logged into your website, they will receive just the email capture message.

Email capture

The required email capture feature will allow you to prevent your customers from sending a message to your chat if they haven’t entered their email address.

This should help a lot in reducing the number of tickets where customers left after leaving a message in the chat and did not provide you with an email address you can use to contact them, thus becoming unreachable.

There are three options for the email capture:

  • Optional: the default option, which is also what was enabled for now. Customers can send messages, but if they are not associated with an email address, they will be prompted to enter theirs.
  • Always required: customers can never send a message without entering their email address first (except if we already have their email address).
  • Required outside business hours: outside of business hours, behaves like always required; during business hours, behaves like optional.
The email capture feature cannot be disabled. Also, we cannot affect the time after which it would be triggered, at least for now.
If you are adding your Gorgias user email to the email capture, it won't be picked up by our system, please check more info here.
If your customer didn't get back to you on your chat ticket after 1 hour, our system will automatically send them the transcript of the chat so far.
Change email capture message

Change your email capture message from the default ones real quick using our chat code! Here's how:

Chat view and section

Apart from being able to check your chat tickets in the Chats view, these will also appear in the Chats section on the left-hand side just above the views section. This section will appear only if you are set as available to chat and shows you chats that are assigned to you as well as any unassigned chats.

If more than 6 conversations are open (unassigned or assigned to a current agent), we only display 6 based on when last message happened within a chat ticket. Tickets with most recent last messages will be displayed.

Chat assignment setting

You can use the Chat assignment setting to remove an assigned agent from a ticket if they are unavailable. For more information take a look at this article.

If a customer responds to a chat ticket after 3 days of inactivity, this will create a new ticket. This way, we can separate conversations about different topics.

Send some replies!

Now that you're completely ready to answer your chat tickets, here's some additional cool stuff that you can add to your replies to spice them up!

We've added the ability for you to send messages with rich text formatting and embedded hyperlinks when replying to a chat ticket in Gorgias. The same goes for chat campaigns, of course.

When viewing a chat ticket, you will see additional buttons below your text input field that will let you insert bold, underlined, and italic text, as well as the ability to create hyperlinks, insert inline images and add emojis to your message.

Here's a quick example of this below:

What do you think? Yay or Nay?