Add a website widget for x-bees

Put a chat and call button on your website so visitors reach a team directly, without a form or a phone number.

Put a chat and call button on your website so visitors reach a team directly, without a form or a phone number.

Widget or personal link

• A widget reaches a team. Whoever is available picks it up. Right for a website.
• A personal contact-me link reaches one person. Right for an email signature or a proposal.

Configuring widgets needs SuperBee; being reachable through one needs Standard. On x-hoppers the widget comes with HelperHopper and above, so a retailer does not need x-bees for this.

Set one up

1. In WMS, go to PBX > Integrations > Cloud integrations and choose Kite under Channels.
2. Click Add new widget. Give it a name, then work down the sections: who may use it, what it looks like, when it is open, and where conversations go.
3. Under Routing Settings, send incoming conversations to an agent, a service, or a bot. A service is usually the right answer, because it survives someone being on holiday.
4. Save it, open it again and go to the Installation instructions tab for the code.
5. Paste that code into your website before the closing </head> tag, on every page the widget should appear on.

The last step usually needs whoever maintains your site. The rest is administration in WMS, so tell us if you would rather we set it up.

Where to put it

Everywhere is the default and rarely the best answer. A widget on your contact page, and wherever people compare options, catches someone with a question they were about to give up on. On a blog post it mostly catches people who were not going to buy anything.

Decide what happens when nobody answers

A widget that goes unanswered is worse than no widget: the visitor asked and got silence. You do not have to solve that with staffing alone, because the widget can act by itself.

• Working Hours are set on the widget, with as many rules as you need, and a separate routing for outside them. Send those conversations to a different service, or to a bot.
• Actions fire on a condition: no reply within a set time, a message not read, or no activity at all. The interval runs from five seconds to a day.
• An action either sends a message, such as telling the visitor when somebody will get back to them, or adds members, which is how you pull in a second line when the first does not answer.

Set at least the first one before the widget goes live. "We reply within a few hours on weekdays" costs nothing and beats an empty box at 22:00.

An hour of silence escalates by itself

Where the widget routes to a service, x-bees does not simply wait. A conversation that goes unanswered for sixty minutes pulls in the call group manager, who is added to the conversation and emailed about it.

That manager is whoever is named in the Missed calls manager field of the call group in WMS, so it is worth checking that field holds somebody who reads their mail before you rely on this as your safety net.

What the visitor experiences

They open the widget, read whatever welcome message you set, and start typing. Whether the conversation outlives the visit depends on how you configured access.

• An authenticated visitor verifies an email address, and that is what keeps the thread alive: they can come back later and find it.
• A guest session is temporary. Close it and the conversation is gone, and it does not come back even if the visitor registers with their email afterwards. Guests also have no access to the calendar, so they cannot book a meeting.

So if returning visitors matter to you, do not switch on Allow only guest sessions. If a low barrier matters more, do, and accept that every conversation starts from nothing.

See also

• Share your personal contact-me link
• Start a conversation and add guests