Web Chat adds a chat widget to your website, so you can talk with visitors the moment they land on your pages. Every chat goes into your Ontraport Inbox, alongside email and SMS. Your team can chat live, and chatbots can collect details and answer common questions around the clock. In this lesson, you'll set up a channel, install it, and see how a visitor becomes a contact and reaches a person.
Web Chat is available on all account levels with an Inbox plan. If your account is on Inbox Preview, upgrade to a standard plan to create and turn on chat channels. One important warning: if you ever cancel your Inbox plan, your Web Chat channels and their conversation history are permanently deleted.
Go to Inbox, then Settings, then Channels, and select Web chat. On the General tab, name the channel and switch on Enable web chat. Under Route new conversations to, pick the inbox these chats should land in, like one called New Leads. Set your business hours, choose whether the launcher is always visible, and set how long a chat can wait before your team is alerted. You can also show each team member's first name and last initial, or a single chatbot name and image.
On the Engagement tab, add a welcome message for new chats, and automatic greetings that pop up after a visitor has been on a page for a few seconds. You can greet unidentified visitors, known contacts and logged-in members differently.
The Installation tab has instructions for adding the widget to an Ontraport site, Ontraport pages and templates, a custom website or a WordPress site. Save your settings to create the channel. To change how the widget looks, go to Inbox, then Settings, then Web chat style. There's one style for the whole account, with the launcher's position and colors, a light or dark theme, and your title and subtitle.
Every new channel comes with a visitor automation, already published. It checks whether the visitor is already a contact. If they are, it creates a conversation in your Inbox right away. If not, it checks your business hours and sends an online or an offline greeting.
Then it shows a short form for their name, email and question. When they submit, they become a contact, their chat history moves onto their record, and a conversation is created in your Inbox. To change these steps, go to Inbox, Settings, Channels, select your channel, and click Edit on the Automation tab.
The chatbot is built from three automation steps. Chatbot messages send text into the chat. Chatbot forms collect details inside the chat window. Chatbot buttons give visitors choices.
For example, ask "Who would you like to speak to?" with Sales and Support buttons. Each button adds its own goal to your map, so each answer can take a different path.
And a Now is during business hours condition lets you send an after-hours reply automatically.
For the handoff, return to your channel in Inbox settings, open its Automation tab, and edit the visitor automation. Create conversation is exclusive to that visitor map; it is not available in standard or contact Web Chat automations. Use it to hand the chat to your team. It creates a new conversation in the Inbox for the channel you pick, so a rep can step in. It only works once the visitor is a known contact. For unidentified visitors, it's skipped. In the Inbox, filter to the Web Chat channel, and click Assign to me on a conversation to take it. If the visitor goes offline, your next reply goes out by email, with a link back into the chat.
So: with an Inbox plan, create a web chat channel, set its routing and hours, install it, and let the visitor automation collect details and hand each chat to your team. Next up: Deals and Companies.