How to put the VICIdial chat widget on your website

Set up a VICIdial Chat Group so a chat entry point on your website routes inbound chats to agents the same way calls are queued.

Putting a live chat widget on your website with VICIdial is mostly a server-side job. You build a Chat Group inside the admin, and that group becomes the destination an inbound website chat lands in. Your agents then handle those chats the same way they handle inbound calls. This post explains the operator-level pieces: the customer-facing chat screen, the Web Form addresses that fire from the agent client, and the colors and logo a visitor sees.

The chat group is the entry point

A Chat Group is the inbound destination for website chats, the chat equivalent of an inbound voice group. The feature has to be turned on in Admin then System Settings first. Once it is on, you create a group with a Group ID, Group Name, and Group Color, and that group is what an arriving chat session is routed into. From the agent's side it behaves like a queued call: the chat pulls up the matching customer record, locks the screen so no call or other chat interrupts, the agent replies, and then they Disposition the Lead and go back into the rotation.

So the website piece and the agent piece are two halves of one setup. The website shows a chat entry point; VICIdial queues the resulting session into your Chat Group and hands it to an available Agent.

What the visitor sees

The visitor on your website gets a Website Customer Chat Screen. You control its look from the group's Customer Chat Screen Colors option, which lets you pick the color scheme and the logo shown to the customer. The default is the standard blue scheme, so if you want it to match your brand, set this before you go live.

Two optional fields round out the visitor experience. A Customer Chat Survey Link sends the customer to a survey after the session ends, and the Customer Chat Survey Text sets the wording they click to get there. Leave the link blank and no survey prompt appears at all.

Web Form, Web Form Two, and Web Form Three

On the agent side, a Chat Group carries three Web Form address fields: Web Form, Web Form Two, and Web Form Three. Each is a custom address that launches when the matching button is clicked on the agent's screen during a chat. These let you wire your CRM record, an order page, or any internal tool to one click while the agent is in the conversation.

If your Web Form needs the lead's custom fields passed in the URL, add &CF_uses_custom_fields=Y to the address. Without it, those custom field values are not handed to the page.

These are the same Web form addresses you already know from voice in-groups, so if you have set up CRM pops for inbound calls, the idea carries straight over to chat.

How a website chat reaches an agent

sequenceDiagram
  participant V as Website visitor
  participant W as Chat widget
  participant G as Chat Group queue
  participant A as Agent screen
  V->>W: Opens chat on your site
  W->>G: Session enters the Chat Group
  G->>A: Routed to available agent
  A->>A: Lead pulled and screen locked
  A->>V: Agent replies in the chat
  A->>G: Disposition then back available

That is the whole flow at an operator level: a chat entry point on your website feeds a Chat Group, and the group hands the session to an agent who works it like an inbound call. For how this sits alongside email and voice, read the VICIdial inbound email and chat guide, and for the agent's side of a session see how agents handle inbound website chats. If you would rather not run the server modules yourself, our managed VICIdial plans ship with the chat system ready to switch on.