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TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is Freshchat
- Activate your Freshchat account and set up a password
- Install Freshchat on your website (logged-out visitors)
- Organize Agents into Groups
What is Freshchat
Freshchat is a modern messaging app for sales, support, and customer engagement. A leap from legacy live-chat systems, it brings the continuity and experience of consumer messaging apps to businesses to help them convert visitors and delight customers.
Here's what you need to do once you sign up for a Freshchat account...
Activate your Freshchat account and set up a password
When you sign up with Freshchat you will be directly taken to your Freshchat account. But before you do anything else, you need to activate your account and set a password.
You would have gotten an email from team Freshchat . Click Activate Account and you will be taken to the Freshworks account page, where you can fill in your details and setup a password.
Install Freshchat on your website (logged-out visitors)
It’s easy to install the Freshchat conversations widget (web messenger) on your website. It only takes a few minutes and you can start chatting with your website visitors (people who haven’t logged in).
You can get the Javascript code from here. Or you can use the code snippet below.
<script> function initFreshChat() { window.fcWidget.init({ token: "WEB_CHAT_TOKEN, host: "https://wchat.freshchat.com" }); } function initialize(i,t){var e;i.getElementById(t)?initFreshChat():((e=i.createElement("script")).id=t,e.async=!0,e.src="https://wchat.freshchat.com/js/widget.js",e.onload=initFreshChat,i.head.appendChild(e))}function initiateCall(){initialize(document,"freshchat-js-sdk")}window.addEventListener?window.addEventListener("load",initiateCall,!1):window.attachEvent("load",initiateCall,!1); </script>
Note: Replace ‘Web Chat Token’ in the above code with your Freshchat token by going to Admin > Web Messenger.
Paste the code snippet on every page of your website where you want your Freshchat conversations widget (web messenger) to appear.
Install Freshchat on your web app and restore conversations(logged-in users)
You can install Freshchat on your web app in a few minutes and start communicating with logged-in users on your website.
You can restore user conversations for logged-in users on your web app, every time they initiate a conversation from a different device or browser. To do this, you need to set a unique external ID and restore ID for every user.
Use the following code snippet to identify logged-in users and restore conversations across browsers and devices.
<!--Body--> function initFreshChat() { window.fcWidget.init({ token: "WEB_CHAT_TOKEN", host: "WEB_CHAT_URL", externalId: '1234567', restoredId: restoreId? restoreId : null, onInit: function() { window.fcWidget.on('widget:loaded', function() { window.fcWidget.user.get(function(resp) { var status = resp && resp.status, data = resp && resp.data; if (status !== 200) { window.fcWidget.user.setProperties({ firstName: "John", //user's first name lastName: "Doe", //user's last name email: "john.doe@gmail.com", //user's email address phone: "8668323090", //phone number without country code phoneCountryCode: "+1", // phone's country code plan: "Estate", // user's meta property 1 status: "Active", // user's meta property 2 "Last Payment": "12th August" // user's meta property 3 }); window.fcWidget.on('user:created', function(resp) { var status = resp && resp.status, data = resp && resp.data; if (status === 200) { if (data.restoreId) { // Update restoreId in your database } } }); } }); }); } }); } function initialize(i,t){var e;i.getElementById(t)?initFreshChat():((e=i.createElement("script")).id=t,e.async=!0,e.src="WEB_CHAT_URL/js/widget.js",e.onload=initFreshChat,i.head.appendChild(e))}function initiateCall(){initialize(document,"freshchat-js-sdk")}window.addEventListener?window.addEventListener("load",initiateCall,!1):window.attachEvent("load",initiateCall,!1); <!--Body-->
- External ID - This has to be unique to each logged in user. This information should be passed to Freshchat from your side. For example, a user’s email ID can be their external ID.
- Restore ID - This will be created by Freshchat when a logged-in user (from your webapp) initiates a conversation on Freshchat for the first time. Restore ID is also unique to each user. This ID will be passed to your website from Freshchat on the user creation callback function. You need to store this ID in your database.
The next time the same user starts a conversation through Freshchat from a different browser or app, this restore ID, along with the external ID must be passed from your side to Freshchat for the user conversation to be restored. Otherwise every conversation initiated by the user on a new/fresh browser session will create a new user and the conversation history will be lost.
Note: Replace ‘Web Chat Token’ in the above code with your Freshchat token by going to Admin > Web Messenger. Replace user values with your placeholders. Paste the code snippet on every page of your website where you want Freshchat to appear.
Customize the Freshchat web messenger to reflect your brand
Step 1: Add your business logo and name
Go to Admin > Account Settings > Site/App Settings
Here you can upload your business logo, add your business (App) name, and web notifications domain name.
The ‘Preferred Web Notifications Domain Name’ is useful when users choose to enable browser notifications from you.
Step 2: Pick a theme for your messenger
Go to Admin > Web Messenger > Customize Appearance
Here you can add your brand logo, color, messenger header style, background, and size of your Freshchat conversations widget (web messenger). You can also choose to display the typing indicator by enabling the toggle.
With the Messenger Visibility option, you can make it stay visible, hidden, or only visible within your working hours (Default Business Hours). You can see a preview of all your configurations on the right.
Note: Messenger Visibility does not affect the first response time, offline experience or any other metric in your Freshchat account. And, at the moment only Default Business Hour is supported with messenger visibility. It is not applicable to Business Hours by Groups.
Invite team members to Freshchat
You can invite team members to Freshchat by going to Admin > Agents and adding them there.
When you add an agent, you can do the following,
- Define their role - the agent's access to your Freshchat account will be restricted based on the role you assign to them.
- Define your agent's load level - based on the load levels you have configured under IntelliAssign, and
- Add them to any Group* such as Pre-Sales, Customer Support, or Customer Success.
Freshchat comes with four default roles,
Account Admin/Owner can do everything in Freshchat .
Admin can do everything the account admin can do but Admin cannot access Billing settings.
Super User’s access is similar to Agents but a super user will also be able to create/edit campaigns and FAQs.
Agents have the most basic access in Freshchat . They can engage in customer conversations, access the People section and edit their own profile information.
If you’re on our Forest plan, you can also define custom roles with Roles and Permissions feature.
On the left side, you can see a list of all the custom filters, roles, groups, and loads that you have created.
You can create custom filters by selecting a bunch of agents.
New agents you invite (pending acceptance), will be displayed under Invited Agents.
When you delete agents, they will be listed under the Deleted Agents.
You can bulk edit agent details, or edit individual agent info.
Organize Agents into Groups
If you have multiple teams working with your Freshchat account, like ‘Sales’, ‘Support’, or ‘Marketing’, you can create those teams in Freshchat as Groups.
Go to Admin > Groups > Add Group
You can set up Business Hours for your different teams, across regions, to keep customers in the loop about your business's availability.
Once you create Groups, you can assign/auto-route incoming messages to different Groups instead of individual agents. Agents who are available/free can then pickup conversations and start replying.
You can edit group details/delete groups anytime by clicking on the drop-down option against the Group name.