Overview
Providing real-time support to your customers is a critical part of a good support strategy. Kayako Classic's Live Chat features enable your team to provide fast and friendly help to your customers from your support center, as well as any website you choose. This feature is available in the Kayako Classic Engage and Fusion versions.
Live chat in Kayako Classic has a variety of moving pieces. This article provides information on how those pieces interact and how you can get all of them working to provide a seamless live chat experience for your staff and customers.
Live Chat Basics
There are two sides to Kayako Classic's live chat functionality:
Staff-facing: To receive and respond to customer chats, your staff or agents need two things:
- To belong to a Live Support department. If you need help creating a new department or assigning staff to a department, refer to this article on Organizing Your Support Requests into Departments.
- To be running Kayako Desktop, our desktop application for handling customer chats. Learn all about Kayako Desktop in our installation guide and in our articles on how to use Kayako Desktop for Windows and Kayako Desktop for Mac.
Customer-facing: To allow your customers to send your team live chat messages, you will need to enable the live chat button on your support center by ensuring that you have one or more agents signed in to the Kayako Desktop. You also have the option of adding a button to any external website from which you want to offer real-time support. You can choose from a variety of styles for your live chat buttons.
Once you set both sides up, your customers will see a button like the one above, which they can click on to start a new chat with your support team.
When a customer clicks the live chat button, they will be asked to fill in a form with their details, including their name, email, and what they are looking for help with.
Once the customer submits their details, the chat request will be sent to an available team member via Kayako Desktop. When the agent accepts the offer, they will be able to talk to the customer directly and resolve their issue.
A complete record of the conversation is saved in the Chat History log, which you can reach via the staff control panel.
Common Questions
Below are some articles covering common questions around the live chat functionality.
- Are the Files That Clients Attach in Live Chat Found in the Database?
- What Are the Chat Statuses in Kayako Classic?
- Is It Possible to Open a Chat When All Support Agents Are Busy and Just Add It to the Live Chat Queue?
- Extracting Chat Login and Logout Time
Known Problems
- Error 'Uncaught Exception AutoExecute Query: AutoExecute Query: INSERT swchatobjects' When Initiating a Live Chat Session
- Messages/Surveys Tab in the Live Support Section Hangs and Freezes When Opening It
- Users Not Displaying in Kayako Desktop
Live Chat Button
For your support center, a live chat button is available by default. It will switch to Online as soon as one or more of your agents install Kayako Desktop and sign in.
For other websites, the admin control panel includes an option to generate a customized block of code, which you can add to your site. You have the choice to Generate the code for a button, a badge, or a plain-text link.
Note that there is also an integration available for WordPress sites as mentioned in Adding Live Chat on WordPress Kayako Integration
Live Chat Customization
Similar to other features in Kayako Classic, one can easily customize different aspects of the Live Chat experience.
For instance, you can customize the live chat button or the header of your live chat window with your company logo by editing one of the live chat templates. Moreover, you can also add Custom Fields to your chat form to capture additional information from customers before they start a chat.
Below are some articles with instructions on how to customize some areas using the available settings and templates.
- Customizing Your Support Center's Live Chat Button
- Changing the Default Department in Live Chat Window
- Removing the Privacy Policy Consent Statement From the Live Chat Submission Form
- Changing the Logo on the Live Chat Submission Form
Advanced Customization
Besides having the option to customize the live chat feature within the templates and settings in Kayako Classic, one can also customize some of the source code for the component. This type of customization is intended for developers as one needs to have some coding experience, and it is strongly recommended to use a development instance and have a backup before applying any changes.
Note that changes done to the code would be overwritten whenever the Kayako Classic application is upgraded/reinstalled as this would replace all installation files. Thus, in such scenarios one would need to apply the code changes again.
The files for the Live Chat app can be found under <installation folder>/__apps/livechat. For instance, if you need to modify some specific part of the live chat window shown to users, you can update the /__apps/livechat/javascript/visitor/thirdparty/legacy/livesupport.js file.
The article Updating the Timestamp Format for the Live Chat Window covers an example of modifying the RetrieveTimeStamp() function in the livesupport.js file in order to output the time in 12h instead of 24h format.
Other areas of this file can be modified depending on the changes required, and as mentioned above it is recommended to test any changes before pushing them into production.