The Web Chat widget

Web Chat is the embeddable chat widget you place on your website. A visitor clicks the launcher in the corner, types a message, and the conversation appears in Atender’s inbox like any other channel.

What you get

• One embed snippet per widget. Paste a single <script> tag into your site and the widget renders on every page. No build step, no framework integration.
• Full visual customization. Brand colors, dark mode with separate palettes, launcher icon or team-photo launcher, bubble colors per direction, custom send-button icon.
• Multi-language widget UI. Set a primary language and add as many secondary languages as you need. The welcome message, button labels, and system text can all be localized.
• Pre-chat survey. Ask for name, email, phone, or any custom field before the conversation begins.
• Routing. Send the conversation to a default team, or hand it to an Agent Stack for autonomous handling.
• Manual channel switching. Let the visitor move the conversation to email, SMS, or WhatsApp mid-chat.
• Dead connection detection. When the visitor’s connection drops, the widget can switch the conversation to an alternative channel so you don’t lose them.
• Opening hours support. Show a different message outside business hours so visitors know when to expect a reply.
• Conversation resumption. A returning visitor’s earlier conversation reappears within a configurable window, so they don’t have to repeat themselves.

One widget or many

You can run multiple widgets per tenant. The most common reasons to use more than one:

• Different brands sharing one Atender tenant, each with its own colors and team.
• A pre-sales widget on marketing pages routing to a sales Agent Stack, and a separate support widget on the help center routing to the support team.
• A widget for English-speaking customers routed to one team, another in a different language routed to a different team.

Each widget has its own data-widget-id in the embed snippet, so the same script tag varies only by ID across sites.

Where Web Chat fits

A Web Chat conversation is a regular conversation in Atender. It carries the same lifecycle (Active, Snoozed, Done, Archived), it can be assigned, tagged, merged, and resolved like any other channel.

If you start a conversation in Web Chat and the visitor leaves, you can:

• Wait for them to come back. If they return inside the resume window, they continue the same conversation.
• Let dead-connection detection switch the conversation to email or SMS automatically.
• Let the visitor manually switch the conversation to another channel from inside the widget.

What is NOT in Web Chat

A few things tenants familiar with other live-chat tools sometimes expect that Atender’s Web Chat does not do:

• No idle-based automatic switching. “If the visitor is inactive for X minutes, switch them to email” is not shipped. The widget reacts to a dropped connection, not to inactivity. See Configure dead-connection detection.
• No visitor screen-sharing or co-browsing.
• No outbound chat from the widget side. Web Chat starts when the visitor opens it; agents can’t initiate a chat to a specific visitor.

Where to start

1. Create a Web Chat widget in Settings → Web Chat.
2. Customize the appearance so it matches your site.
3. Install the widget by pasting the embed snippet on your site.
4. (Optional) Add a pre-chat survey if you want context before the conversation begins.

See also

• Create a Web Chat widget
• Install the widget
• Customize widget appearance