Installing and using Gorgias Chat

Using the chat integration is a great way for your customers and leads to connect with your support team without the hassle of creating an email.

Adding the chat on your website

To add a chat widget on your website:

1. In Gorgias, click on "Integrations," then click "Chat"
2. Click "Add chat"
3. Name your chat. This will usually be the name of your company
4. Go to "Installation" and click add chat to your store. If you're not on Shopify, you can copy and paste the HTML code on your web-page.

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

Availability of the chat

The chat status will always depend on your set business hours (under your Gorgias dashboard > Settings > Business Hours). Outside of business hours, chat will show in offline mode. During your business hours, chat will show in online mode.

Note regarding agents profile image:

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

- In case that you have agents available for chat outside business hours, the chat widget will still be displayed in offline mode and 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 appears 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

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 agents availability, but will instead behave differently depending on whether we’re currently during your business hours or not.

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.

Required email capture for chat

Required email capture feature will allow you to prevent your customers from sending a message in 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.

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.