Before you install
Installing the widget takes a minute. Deciding what happens after a visitor types into it is the part that determines whether chat helps or quietly embarrasses you, and it is much easier to settle before the first real conversation than during it.
The three decisions are always the same. Who answers, and what else are they supposed to be doing at that moment. Which hours you are honestly available, and what the widget says outside them. And what the AI assistant is allowed to answer on its own versus what it should hand to a person immediately.
- Name one owner, not a rota of people who might notice the notification
- Write the real hours down, then make the widget agree with them
- Decide the handoff line before launch: billing, cancellations, anything account-specific
- Draft five canned responses for the questions you already know are coming
Live chat launch checklist
Who should own live chat
After-hours strategy
Installing it
The install is a single script tag placed just before the closing body tag of your template. It is marked async and defer, so the browser fetches it off the critical rendering path and it does not block your page from painting. One snippet on one shared template covers the whole site.
When a widget does not show up, the cause is almost always one of three things, and all three are visible in the browser console rather than mysterious. A Content Security Policy that does not allow our host will block the runtime outright, and blocking it on styles instead of scripts produces the confusing version where the widget mounts but looks wrong.
- Content Security Policy must allow
*.mylivechat.com on both script-src and style-src
- An http snippet on an https page is mixed content, and the browser drops it silently
- The widget renders inline in your page rather than in an iframe, so an aggressive global CSS rule on your site can restyle it
- Check a cached CDN copy of your template before concluding the snippet is missing
How to add live chat to your website
Does live chat slow your site down?
The first two weeks
The most useful thing you can do after launch is unglamorous: read the transcripts. Not a sample dashboard, the actual conversations. Two weeks of real chats will tell you which page confuses people, which question repeats until it deserves a canned response, and which answer your AI assistant is getting almost right.
Changes made from that reading stick, because they are answers to something a customer really typed. Changes made from a hunch tend to be reverted a month later. Set a recurring half hour, take a deliberate sample rather than scrolling from the top, and write down one change per week.
- Two of the longest chats, two that ended unresolved, two at random
- Turn every third-repeat question into a canned response
- Feed the questions the AI missed back into its trained content
- Fix the page the question is really about, not just the answer
The 30-minute weekly review
Your first week with live chat
Canned responses that work
Humans and AI together
An AI assistant that answers everything is not the goal, and a team that answers everything is not affordable. The arrangement that works is narrow: the assistant handles the questions your published content already answers, and everything touching an account, a payment or a promise goes to a person with the conversation history attached.
Because the assistant is grounded in content you supply rather than general knowledge, the honest way to widen its scope is to publish better content, not to loosen its instructions. It also replies in the visitor's own language when it can tell what that is, which quietly removes a barrier on international traffic.
- Let the assistant own the repetitive, published-answer questions
- Route account, billing and complaint conversations to a person from the first message
- Keep the transcript with the conversation so the visitor never repeats themselves
- Review what the assistant answered weekly, the same way you review agents
When not to use AI in live chat
Fallback and handoff design
Reviewing AI chat answers