Decide who answers, and when
A chat window nobody answers is worse than none. Before you add one, decide:
- Your hours. When your team is online, and what visitors see outside those hours.
- Who answers. Which people or team get website chats, and who covers when they are busy.
- What Texa handles. Common questions can be answered automatically at any hour, from your approved information, with your team taking over when needed.
Set it up in Texa Desk
- In Texa Desk, open Settings, then Inboxes, and add a new inbox. Choose Website.
- Enter your website’s name and address, pick the colour of the chat window, and write a welcome heading and a short tagline.
- Add the people who will answer chats from this inbox.
- Copy the code Texa Desk shows you. It is one short script.
Then add the code to your website:
- Any website: paste it just before the closing
</body>tag on every page, or in your site’s shared footer. - WordPress: use your theme’s footer settings or a plugin that adds code to the header and footer, and paste it there.
- Shopify: go to Online Store, then Themes, choose Edit code on your theme, open
theme.liquid, and paste it just before</body>.
Open your website, and the chat button appears in the corner. Send a test message and you’ll see it arrive in your Texa Desk inbox, with the page you sent it from.
Make it useful from the first message
- Business hours. Set them in the inbox’s Business Hours tab, with an away message. Texa keeps answering what it can.
- A form before the chat, if you need it. The Pre Chat Form tab can ask for a name and email first. Leave it off if you want as many people as possible to start a chat.
- Greetings on chosen pages. Show a message on your pricing or checkout page after a few seconds, and let Texa take it from there.
- A rating at the end. Turn on the satisfaction survey in the CSAT tab to ask visitors to rate the help they got.
Recognise signed-in customers safely
If your website has accounts, you can tell the chat who the visitor is, so Texa can look up their orders or balance. Do it safely: your server signs the customer’s identifier with a secret key from the inbox’s Configuration tab, and Texa Desk checks the signature. Without it, anyone could claim to be someone else.
Once your site sends the signature for everyone, turn on the setting that requires identity validation, so unsigned requests are rejected. The developers page has the details.
Inside your mobile app too
Customers who use your app should get the same help without leaving it. The Texa API gives you a ready-made chat component for React Native (Flutter is coming soon), and your team answers from the same inbox. See live chat.
Measure and improve
Watch how long visitors wait for a first reply, how many chats end with the problem solved, and how they rate the help. Read the chats that went badly every week. They usually point to a missing answer or a page on your website that confuses people. Our guide to customer service metrics explains each number.
A chat window shouldn’t slow your website down. Texa Desk’s script loads without holding up your page, and on this website we load it only once the page has finished loading.
