How do you set up live chat on your website?

Required tools

• Dynamics 365 Contact Center — With access to channel setup.
• Staffing clarified — Who responds, and during which time periods.

Clarify before you open

1. 1.Set the opening hours and decide what happens outside them

   An unanswered chat is worse than no chat at all. Set opening hours that match your staffing levels, and have the widget offer a form outside those hours.

2. 2.Choose which pages the chat should appear on

   Put it where people actually have questions—pricing, support, contact. Chat on the homepage generates the most volume and the least relevance.

Set up and test

1. 3.Configure the channel and widget

   Set up the chat workflow, customize its appearance, and add a welcome message explaining what the chat can help with.

2. 4.Connect to queue and routing

   The chat must be routed to a queue with agents who have capacity. Otherwise, the conversation will go unnoticed, and the customer will only see that no one is responding.

3. 5.Set capacity per agent

   Decide how many concurrent chats an agent should handle. Two is a reasonable starting point for most agents.

4. 6.Test the entire journey as a customer

   Open the website in a private window and start a conversation. Check the wait time, that it is assigned to the correct agent, and what happens outside opening hours.