Use Guide to Offer Chat

When using Guide to offer chat, visitors start a chat session from a Guide template or proactive offer. The chat thread appears in the Guide widget.

To use proactive offers to offer chat and to use certain engagement rule conditions, you must have a license for CXone Guide.

High Level Steps

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Define the chat button and branding.

If not done already, define the default chat channel button. This is the button that appears on your website to start a chat session.

Guide also lets you define the branding (default colors) to use for the Guide widget.
Create a chat entry point.

Create a chat entry point. This is where you specify the chat channel to use.
Create a single-channel template to display the Chat button.

Create a single-channel template.

  • Set Entry point to the chat entry point you created.

  • Leave Button blank to use the default chat button you created.

  • Set Label to any text that you want to appear to the right of the chat button. For example, Chat?

    A blue button with the word Chat and an icon representing chat bubbles

  • After saving the changes, check the appearance of the template by clicking Initialization & Test. Make sure that the button to start a chat appears. Confirm that the branding looks right.

Create an engagement rule that displays the template on your website.

Create an engagement rule that displays the template.

  1. Select ACD > GUIDE > Engagement Rules.

  2. Click Add Engagement rule to define a new rule.

    The page where you define an engagement rule

  3. Enter a Name for the rule, such as Show Chat on Home Page.

  4. Set Event to Visitor page view. All Guide rules must be based on the Visitor page view event.

  5. Click Save. The page is refreshed.

  6. Click Add Condition to set the conditions for when the chat should appear on a page. If you set no conditions, the template appears on all of the pages of your website on which you embed Guide.

  7. Click Add new action to indicate the template to display.

    1. Set Name to a name for action, such as Show Chat.

    2. Set Action to Guide Template. Some additional fields appear.

    3. Enter some text in the Proactive action name field. The field is required but is not used.

    4. Set Guide template to the single-channel template you created.

    5. Select Change template realtime to continuously check whether chat is available while the visitor is on a page, not just when the visitor navigates to the page.

    6. Click Save to save the action to the rule.

  8. Click Activate at the top of the page to make the rule available to website visitors.

Embed Guide on your website.

Embed Guide on your website by copying the JavaScript code and pasting it on the pages of your website where you want to offer Guide.

Verify the template appears on the home page.

View the home page of your website and confirm that the chat button appears.

Using Chat-Specific Conditions in Engagement Rules

Guide provides several chat-specific conditions that you can use when creating engagement rules to offer a chat button:

  • Set the Time in queue condition (if you have licensed Guide) to show the chat button only when the wait is within the time period you set. Guide tracks the average wait time across all skills specified for the past hour to determine the average wait time.

    The page where you define the Time In Queue condition for a chat engagement

  • Set the Chat Is Active condition to only show the chat button when agents are available to assist visitors.

    The page where you define the Chat Is Active condition for a chat engagement

Using a Multi-Channel Template to Offer Chat

If you are using other digital channelsClosed A way for contacts to interact with agents or bots. A channel can be voice, email, chat, social media, and so on., you can create a multi-channel template in Guide and offer chat with another channel. For example, you might configure chat and email with the following buttons:

Two round blue buttons. One contains an envelope icon and the other a chat bubble icon.

See the Guide use cases for more examples of using Guide with chat and other digital channels.

Offering a Different Channel When Chat Is Unavailable

You can create two engagement rules that work together to display the chat channel when agents are available and another channel, such as email, when they're unavailable:

  • For the rule that offers chat when agents are available, set Chat Is Active to Yes and select the skills to check for.

  • For the rule that offers email when agents aren't available, set Chat Is Active to No and select the skills to check for.

When defining the actions for each of these engagement rules, select Change template realtime. If agents become available while a visitor is on a page, the chat channel automatically replaces the email channel and vice versa.

Using a Precontact Web Survey for Chat

  • As a best practice, define a precontact survey form for your chat entry point.

  • When defining a template that references a chat entry point with a precontact survey form, you have the option of including a precontact survey icon and label at the top of the Guide widget.

    A precontact survey form in a Guidewidget with a survey icon and label at the top.

    The icon and label are followed by the Name field that is automatically provided for the chat. Then, the custom fields defined in the precontact survey form appear.

  • If the chat channel also has a precontact survey defined, that survey is skipped. The visitor only sees the survey specified in the Guide entry point.

Continuing a Chat

If the visitor starts a chat from a Guide widget, and then navigates to a different page, they can continue the conversation with the agent. Guide displays either a button or a link on a Guide widget to continue the conversation until the chat session ends.

Also, if a visitor crosses domains or subdomains while using your website, Guide retains the visitor data so that the chat session continues uninterrupted. Note that cross-domain support is not available for the Safari browser.