Having the opportunity to customize the product you’re getting, be it a physical item, or a digital widget, is always exciting. The option to do so not only helps you stand out among others, but more importantly, makes the product fit you better. One of the coolest things about Chatwee is its flexibility in terms of adjusting to your existing website. In this post I’ll cover some of our live chat customization basics to make your venture into the world of real-time online interaction as smooth and effective as possible. Let’s go!
If you have been using Chatwee for some time now, you’re probably going to be pretty familiar with the live chat customization techniques discussed here. If, on the other hand, you’re new to our widget, you’ll find this post to be a handy guide to making it more personal and fitting.
The sections below aim to cover some of the essentials of our control panel. It’s kind of an introduction supposed to help you get your feet wet.
Alright, so you’ve installed our social chat widget, now what? Well, it’s time to tailor it to your website! Luckily, the Chatwee live chat customization is a walk in the park. Trust me, you’ll manage it just fine. Delve into the basics below and get going in no time.
Chat display mode
First things first. Before your site starts buzzing with activity, you need to decide on how you want to present the chat to the visitors. Using Chatwee, you have three options to choose from.
The widget can be displayed as a fixed tab, always sitting at the bottom of the page, ready to be opened. A chat box, that you can embed somewhere on the site, making it an integral part of the design. And on top of that, you have the so called Full URL, which is a link that opens up the chat in the full screen mode.
As far as the two former display modes should be clear to you, the latter may require some extra explanation. What you can do with the said link is turn it into anchor text that can be placed anywhere on your site, including breadcrumbs or menu tabs. This way you create a standalone chat room and don’t have to interfere with your site’s layout.
Color scheme
Next essential aspect of your live chat customization involves selecting the chat template. There’s a preset color scheme for each of them, but Chatwee gives you the freedom to further edit the hues of particular chat elements by entering hex color codes.
It’s super easy to do that, and if you happen to be not familiar with this coding system, follow the link above to get a grasp of the basics.
Colors are a crucial facet of branding, and here’s where you can make the widget fit yours. On the other hand, if the chat appears to be particularly important to your site’s operations, you may want to experiment with colors to make it stand out and noticeable.
Privacy settings
Here’s a rather broad and surely one of the central points of live chat customization. Chatwee offers a range of privacy settings you can adjust to your needs, but let me now focus on some of the most important ones.
First, you should decide what type of users can access your chat. You may go ahead with permissive settings and allow everyone, including anonymous guests to chat. Alternatively, you can limit the users to only those logged in via their Facebook accounts, for example.
You can also choose whether you want the chat widget to start automatically upon visitor’s entry to your site and whether you want him to be automatically logged in as a guest user. There’s more to our live chat customization in terms of privacy, but you’ll get there in due time.
Single Sign-on
Single Sign-on is an excellent feature, especially for well-established and active online communities. For those of you not familiar with it, here’s a quick primer.
After its implementation, site members who log in to their accounts become automatically logged in to the chat as well. A simple and effective process that saves time and effort.
Please keep in mind though that this feature is only available with Chatwee’s paid plans. After you become a subscriber of one of those, the details necessary for the implementation of SSO are provided to you in Dashboard.
Chat moderators
Last but not least, your fundamental live chat customization won’t be complete without assigning moderators. The number of them depends on the plan you’re using and grows alongside the number of simultaneous chat users.
It’s completely up to you who you’re going to entrust with moderation powers, although there’s one prerequisite for potential candidates.
As you’ll see in Dashboard, there are different ‘types’ of admins. That is, even though their powers are the same, there are different login methods they can use to access the chat.
In any case, there’s always an email address involved, and before you’ll be able to list it as a moderator’s, the person has to log in to the chat at least once prior to be named an admin.
To give you an example, say the soon to be moderator is going to use his Facebook account to log in to Chatwee. He’ll have to log in to the chat at least once using that account before you can add his Facebook email address in Dashboard.
Live chat customization – the wrap up
Alright Chatwee rookies, that’s the end of your live chat customization 101! I hope you’ll find it helpful in maximizing the positive impact our chat widget will have on your online community.
Once you get comfortable with the basics, you can move on to other aspects of live chat customization like language, file and media sharing, welcome cloud, fonts, profanity and user name filters, banning, and more.
Now log in to your Dashboard and play around. Don’t forget to hit that blue save button when you’re done!
