Easy proactive chat for your LibraryH3lp-powered virtual service

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Awhile back, we shared with you some ideas on how to add proactive chat to your web pages with custom JavaScript. Because there was so much interest and positive feedback from that post, we've rolled out integrated proactive chat invitations for your LibraryH3lp-powered service. No more need for custom JavaScript. Just dead simple point and click. Sound good? Let's do it!

Anatomy of a Proactive Invitation

Proactive chat invitations come in two basic flavors - a button dialog or an image dialog. For the image dialog, we offer a default "Chat now" image as well as several other choices. Alternatively, you can opt to use any image you'd like. And there are 24 different theme options available for your proactive invitation.

How To

The magic lives in the Chat snippets part of the LibraryH3lp admin dashboard.  You can add proactive chat invitations to any existing chat snippet.  Proactive will include an invitation to chat in addition to your existing in-page option, leaving the in-page option unchanged.  If you've never used chat snippets before, they replace the functionality of our old DIY-style code plus give you added flexibility to configure your virtual service on the fly without having to edit your web pages.

To add proactive chat to a service, click the Edit button and scroll down to the section labeled "Routing for incoming chats." Click the Proactive options tab and from there you'll be able to craft your own proactive service. The proactive invitation is timer-based. After a timed period that you control, a guest browsing your web page will see a chat invitation. Placement of the invitation within your web page is configurable.

Proactive and polite

So what happens when a guest declines your invitation? After all, you don't want to risk annoying the guest as they navigate your site with a recurring invitation on each page visit. No worries. For that, we have a cookie that remembers that the guest has declined your proactive invitation.

When you are testing your proactive invitation and need to trigger the dialog again, simply delete the "libraryh3lp-shhh" cookie and you're ready to go.

Note: Integrated proactive chat is not yet available on the LibraryH3lp Canadian regional server.  We'll update this post when released on that regional.