The Livechat widget settings are divided into the following sections. We’ll go through what each of them contains and how to manage them below.
This is where you manage the widget's appearance and behaviour.
This is the first view your customers see when they open the chat widget. You can customize:
Messages: Set different greeting messages for known, logged-in users versus anonymous visitors. You can also customize the introduction, chat titles, and descriptions.
Background: Make the widget match your site's branding by choosing a flat color, a gradient, or uploading a background image.
Links: Add menu items to the widget's home screen that can link to your help center articles, external pages, or other resources.
This section controls the appearance of the screen during an active conversation. You can enhance the user experience by enabling options like:
Show previous messages: Allows returning customers to see their past conversation history within the widget.
Show agent avatar: Displays your support agents' profile pictures, adding a personal touch to the conversation.
The launcher is the button on your website that customers click to open the live chat widget. You can adjust its position on the page (e.g., bottom right, bottom left) and choose its style. You can display it as a default icon or use custom text to make it more descriptive, like "Chat with us!".
To ensure brand consistency, you can fine-tune every visual aspect of the widget. Under the Style section, you can either select a predefined theme (like Light or Dark) or create your own.
Custom themes allow you to control:
Fonts
Colors (background, foreground, accent colors, etc.)
Radius (the roundness of corners)
This section allows you to control which main views are available to users inside the widget. You can toggle the visibility of:
Home: The initial welcome screen.
Conversations: A list of the user's past conversations (both tickets and chats).
Help: An area where users can view and search help center content.
By enabling or disabling these screens, you can simplify the widget to only offer the functionality you need.
You can also set default screen to "new chat" or "new ticket" to launch directly into a conversation when livechat is opened.
Forms are used to gather essential information from your customers.
Pre-chat form: If enabled, this form appears before a customer can start a chat. You can use it to request information like their name, email, or the department they need to reach, ensuring your agents have context from the very beginning.
Post-chat form: This form will appear after user's chat was closed. It's a good place to request user to rate their experience.
For both forms, you can configure which fields are available and which are required.
The Timeouts tab helps you manage your support queue efficiently by automating actions on inactive chats. This prevents stale conversations from blocking up your agents' capacity.
These rules work together to create a self-managing chat queue that keeps conversations moving and maximizes agent availability.
You can configure three key rules:
Transfer customer to another agent: If a customer doesn't respond for a set number of minutes, the chat can be automatically transferred to another available agent or put back into the queue.
Mark chat as inactive: After a period with no messages, a chat can be marked as "inactive." This is useful because inactive chats don't count towards an agent's concurrent chat limit, freeing them up to help other customers.
Close the chat: If a conversation has been inactive for an extended period, you can have the system automatically close it. Customers can always reopen the chat later by simply sending a new message.
In the Uploads tab, you control the files that can be shared between your customers and agents.
Here, you can:
Set a maximum file size (in bytes) for any single upload.
Create an "Allowed extensions" list to act as a whitelist (e.g., jpg, pdf, docx), allowing only those file types to be uploaded.
Create a "Blocked extensions" list to prevent specific file types from being uploaded (e.g., exe, zip).
If the "Allowed extensions" list is left empty, all file types are permitted except those in the "Blocked extensions" list.
The Security tab contains crucial settings for ensuring your chat widget is used correctly and securely.
Trusted Domains: This is an important security feature. By listing your website's domains here (e.g., your-website.com), you prevent others from copying your widget's code and placing it on their own unauthorized websites. You can use a wildcard (*.your-website.com) to include all subdomains.
It is strongly recommended to populate the Trusted Domains field. Leaving it blank allows anyone to embed your chat widget on their website.
Enforce Identity Verification: For applications where users log in, this feature provides a higher level of security. When enabled, the widget uses a secret key to cryptographically verify the identity of your logged-in users. This ensures that the user is who they claim to be and prevents others from spoofing their identity in the chat.
This is an advanced security feature recommended for platforms where users have accounts and may discuss sensitive information through chat.
Once you've configured your widget, it's time to add it to your site! Navigate to the Install tab to get your unique code snippet.
Simply copy the provided <script> code and paste it just before the closing </body> tag on every page of your website where you want the live chat widget to appear.
If your BeDesk installation is on a different domain than your main website, you must use the second, more detailed script snippet to explicitly specify the widgetDomain to ensure the widget loads correctly.
See Install livechat widget article for more details on how to install the widget and troubleshoot common installation issues.