If you don’t know how to set up the widget and integrate it with your website or app, check our previous article.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to:
- set your operating hours
- decide if you want to accept video calls from customers
- change colours and adjust the layout
- modify the content and add more languages.
Let’s start by setting up your operating hours - it will affect several other settings later.
Operating hours
With this feature, you can decide what time you are available to customers via live chat & video. When you are offline, you can choose to hide the widget or let customers still leave you messages.
To set your operating hours, scroll to the bottom of the page. Then, activate the switch in the Online hours section:
You will see that a weekly schedule has appeared. By default, the operating hours are set from 9 AM to 5 PM, from Monday to Friday.
You can adjust the hours by clicking on the clock symbol:
If you want to include more working days (for example, you are open on Saturdays), click + Add new time rule above the schedule:
You will see that a new field has appeared at the bottom of the table. Click on Select day and Select time to adjust the schedule.
If you want to remove one of the rules (for example, you are closed on Mondays), click on the grey X symbol next to it:
You can also set multiple rules for a single day.
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Example: On Fridays, you are open from 9 AM to 6 PM, but at 1 PM all your employees have a lunch break and are unavailable. In this case, you need two rules to set your operating hours: the first one from 9 AM to 1 PM and the second one from 2 PM to 6 PM.
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Once you have finished setting your operating hours, set the time zone that you and the agents operate in. This way, the online hours will be displayed properly even if the customer's time zone is different. For example, if your time zone is UTC +1 and you work from 9 AM to 5 PM, a customer in a UTC +3 time zone will see that you are online from 7 AM to 3 PM of their local time.
You change the zone at the bottom of the table:
If you want to hide the widget during those hours when you are unavailable, activate the Hide widget when offline switch:
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When you turn on the Hide widget while offline option, you need to define your business hours. Otherwise, the widget will be always hidden because there are no hours when you are available/online. It means that you are considered to be offline all the time. |
Alternatively, you can leave the live chat visible to your customers when you are offline and still receive messages. You can then set a status message to let them know you will reply as soon as possible - we will discuss it in the text and languages section.
Now that you have set your operating hours, let’s go through the rest of the settings one by one. You will see the changes that you make in real-time by looking at the preview on the right.
Layout and design
- Choose the colour of the live chat widget. You can pick one of the six main colours or click the
icon and select a custom one. - Decide if the button that opens the live chat widget should be positioned in the bottom left or in the bottom right corner of your page:
- Choose if you want to accept video calls from your customers or have chat conversations only. If you would like to enable video chats, turn the Show call button switch on:
- Below, you will see the operators section. Here you can decide if the agents’ profile pictures should be displayed to customers during their live chat conversations. To do that, turn the Show operators avatars switch on:
To make sure this option works properly, you also have to turn on displaying operators profile pictures in the global settings:
You can also display up to three photos of the operators inside the widget window so that customers can see your team members as soon as they open the live chat. You can do that by clicking on the
symbol and selecting operators from the list:
Of course, the number of operators that can join the live chat cases is not limited to three - this is just how many photos will be displayed directly on the widget, next to the heading. The live chat conversation will always show the photo of the actual operator that is handling the case.
- If you have an Enterprise subscription, you can remove the Powered by Vicodo section at the bottom of the widget. To do that, turn off the Show Vicodo branding switch:
Text and languages
- The default language of the widget is English, but you can also make it available in other languages as well. Currently, we support German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian.
The live chat widget language depends on the customer’s browser settings. Remember that if you don't add the languages in this settings tab, the widget will be displayed only in English!To add a new language, click + Add more languages and choose one from the list:
Once you add a new language, you can adjust all the texts. To do so, click Edit next to a chosen language. You will see the changes immediately.
If you want to get back to English, click the right Edit button again.
- Add the header that will appear at the top of the widget.
- Choose the welcome message that appears below the header.
- Set your online and offline statuses (for example, “We are available now” or “We will be available from 9 AM tomorrow”). This option applies only if you have set your operating hours.
- Decide if you want to display a call to action popup next to the live chat button:
- Enter your subheader text. It will appear during your chat conversations, right next to your logo:
And that is all! Remember that you can adjust those settings at any time - you don't need to change the code on your page for the changes to take effect.