Adding a Live Chat Widget Tab to Microsoft Teams

Our Live Chat app for Microsoft Teams is the perfect solution for businesses that want to engage with their website visitors. In addition to our Live Chat, we’ve also found that some teams have a use for our customer-facing Live Chat widget within Microsoft Teams itself, which serves as a way to offer support directly to other team members within the organization. This would be similar to an intranet scenario in which you are supporting other people in your organization through Teams.

Typically when you add our Live Chat Tab to your Team like in this article, you add a Live Chat console tab in which your agents can answer chats from website visitors who are chatting through a web chat widget.

In some cases though, you may want to add a customer-facing Live Chat widget directly within a team so that members of your organization can chat with you from a different Team.

As an example of what this would look like in action, let’s say that you have a large organization that needs to offer tech support to teams within your company. In this scenario, to avoid overcrowding in your message-ways, you could add a Support tab that displays your Live Chat directly into one of your teams. That way, any person could chat with your tech support team privately without posting to a larger public team, eliminating the hassle of sorting and searching through chats.

In addition, if you are offering feedback to other members of your organization but don't want these posts to be visible in the main feed, you can also set up the Live Chat as a tab within Teams.

Here's an example of what a new Website Tab could look like:

To do this, follow the these directions.

1.  Create your Live Chat Standalone URL

You can create a standalone chat url to add your Live Chat to any link, email signature, or social media post. In this case, we're creating the url for use in a Website Tab in Teams.

First, access your Live Chat “Chat Settings” by going to the Live Chat tab on the left sidebar in Teams (once you've added our live chat app to teams). Scroll down until you see the “Standalone Chat URL.” The first time you go here, you will choose a unique short name for your live chat. Once saved, we'll great your chat URL using this name.

In our case, you see that our standalone URL is: https://chat.socialintents.com/c/teamslivechat

2. Add the Website Tab app to your team

Now go to your team where you'd like to have users chat with you using our live chat and click on the '+' button on the top of the team to add an app.    Then search for Website, since you are adding a reference to your standalone chat url.

Then paste your Standalone Chat URL into the website location:

3. Now you have a tab to displays your Live Chat

Now others in your team can chat with you using the live chat app.  You can route your live chat to any other team or channel so that members chatting from this Tab don't have to have access to the Team you're actually answering