Since announcing our live chat beta last month, we’ve made some significant updates – greatly improving the functionality of live chat, and improving your team’s workflow when triaging and answering questions you’ve received through chat. 

Customer identification 

You can now specify customer details such as their name and avatar when a support request is received.

You can also provide an email address which can link them to an existing customer in Plain, reducing the amount of back-and-forth you need to do with customers. You’ll need to authenticate this email address to ensure you’re speaking to the actual customer. You can learn more about setting up authentication in our docs. 

Enhance your chat triaging with Plain’s data model

You can add labels, tiers and tenants on the creation of a new chat session. For example, you could have a label for each section of your site so it’s clear where the customer has submitted the support request from. 

Additional customization of your chat widget 

We’ve introduced some new customization options to the chat widget including:

• Brand color: specify a color that will be used in various places throughout the chat widget – ensuring that it matches the UI and branding of your own product, regardless of where you need to add chat. You can introduce a different color for light/dark mode. 

• Embedding: choose if/where the chat application is shown in your page. This enables completely new user experiences such as a popup, or even entirely embedded in your own page(s).

• Logo: add your logo so the widget matches your own branding. 

• Entry point: decide if you want to skip the welcome screen entirely – letting your customers jump straight into a chat session.

• Chat buttons: customize and add additional chat buttons each (e.g. “Report a bug”, or “Get support”) with their own icon and text. These can even apply different labels, tiers and tenants – making it easier to triage questions that come through your chat.

Chat forms

Similar to chat buttons, you can provide a dropdown (more form controls to come later) when a user creates a new chat session, which can set the previously mentioned Plain data model attributes. 

Unread message emails 

Your customers will now receive emails when they’ve got an unread chat message from you – ensuring that if they leave the page they started the chat on, they’ll get a response and continue the conversation with you. 

Added chat to workflow rules 

You can now set workflow rules actions to trigger once you receive a request through chat. Automatically set a tier, add labels, set priority, assign to a specific user and more when you receive a chat. 

Introduced auto-responses for chat 

With auto-responses you can set expectations immediately about your response times when a customer reaches out through your chat widget. Auto-responses can be conditional, using tiers, labels and business hours to inform the content of your auto-response. 

To add these new features or get started with chat – check out our documentation