Live Chat Integration Guide

Live Chat lets you place a chat widget on your website so visitors can start a conversation, or place a call, with a single click. On your side, agents answer and follow up on all of those conversations from one place in the Cloud Voice App, alongside their other channels.

What Live Chat gives you

• Drop-in website widget. Add the widget to any site by pasting in a snippet of embed code. No development work is required.
• Free chat and calling for visitors. People browsing your site can message an agent or start a voice call at no charge to them.
• Controlled access. Scope the widget to a specific website domain and cap the number of simultaneous calls, so it only runs on sites you trust and can’t be used to drain your resources.

Requirements

Confirm that your Cloud Voice system meets the following before you begin.

Item	Requirement
Firmware	Version 84.20.0.128 or later.
Domain name	The domain name must not contain underscore characters. This is a restriction of the underlying messaging platform; a domain with an underscore causes the messaging channel to fail authentication or stop receiving messages.
Domain certificate	A valid domain certificate must be installed.

Caution

If your Cloud PBX (private branch exchange, the phone system that routes your calls) uses a custom root domain rather than one of the standard domains provided with your Cloud Voice service, install a valid domain certificate on the PBX first. Without it, the messaging channel will fail authentication or fail to receive messages.

Limitations

Keep the following constraints in mind when you plan how your team will use Live Chat.

Item	Detail
Message types	Text, emojis, and images are supported.
Message direction	Inbound only. Agents can receive and reply to visitor messages, but they cannot start a chat or a call with a visitor from the widget.
File retention	Files remain available for 72 hours.
Active sessions	Up to 20 chat sessions can be active at once.

Note

Images must be in .png, .jpg, or .jpeg format, with a maximum file size of 10 MB.

How to set it up

Integrating Live Chat takes two steps:

1. Set up a Live Chat channel. Configure a Live Chat channel on your Cloud Voice system to generate the embed code.
2. Enable Live Chat on your website. Paste the generated embed code into the pages where you want the widget to appear.

Note

The embed code is a short snippet of HTML that you copy from the channel you set up in step 1 and paste into your website’s pages. It loads the widget for visitors, so no further coding is needed on your side.