The help widget for your website

The widget puts a help button on your own website. Visitors can search your help articles or send a request without leaving the page.

1. Go to Settings › Channels › Website widget.
2. Add every site address the widget may run on, for example https://www.yourcompany.com. The widget refuses to load anywhere else.
3. Copy the install snippet into your site's pages. The channel shows Installed once a page with the widget is opened.

The assistant

The widget opens with an assistant that holds a conversation instead of showing a form. It works only from your service desk's own content:

• Questions are answered from your Public help articles (and, for visitors your site signs in, articles for customers). It shows which articles it used. If no article covers the question, it says so and offers to pass it to your team. It never answers from general knowledge.
• Requests (“I need Photoshop”) find the matching request form and ask its questions one at a time, filling in what the visitor already said. The visitor checks a summary and submits it; the request then follows the form's approvals and workflow as usual.
• Problems are checked against live outage announcements and major incidents first (“Email is down for everyone; I've added you”), then your articles; otherwise the assistant collects the details and opens a case.
• Talk to a person works at any point: the case opens with the whole conversation.

Nothing reaches your team until the visitor confirms. Each case or request carries the conversation as a staff-only note. Turn the assistant off, or give it a name, per widget under Settings › Channels › Website widget. The same page lists the questions it could not answer in the last 30 days, so you know which articles to write.

Article suggestions

As a visitor types, the widget suggests matching help articles. Only articles whose visibility is Public are suggested; articles for signed-in customers only never appear on your public website. Settings › Channels tells you how many public articles the widget can draw on, and warns you when there are none.

To open the widget from your own button or link (for example Contact support in your site's menu), call ServAIceDesk.open() from your page's JavaScript; ServAIceDesk.close() closes it. Your page also receives servaicedesk:widget-ready, servaicedesk:widget-open and servaicedesk:widget-close events.

Verifying who wrote

A visitor types their email address, which is not verified. Cases from the widget are marked website widget, email not verified so staff confirm identity before acting on anything sensitive, such as a password reset.

Signed-in visitors (verified email)

If people are signed in to your site, your site can prove who they are, as Intercom and Help Scout do. Their requests then arrive as theirs, marked verified by your site.

1. In Settings › Channels › Website widget, open Signed-in visitors on your widget and choose Create signing secret. Copy it; it is shown once. Keep it on your server, never in the page.
2. On your server, sign the visitor's email: the hex HMAC-SHA256 of the lowercased email with the secret. In Node.js: crypto.createHmac("sha256", SECRET).update(email.toLowerCase()).digest("hex").
3. Add data-user-email and data-user-signature to the widget code on pages where the visitor is signed in. The widget fills in their email and locks it.

A wrong signature is refused. To accept only signed-in visitors, tick Only accept requests from signed-in visitors; anyone else is asked to sign in to your site first. Replace secret issues a new one (old signatures stop working) and Remove secret goes back to unsigned requests.

Visitors can follow up in the widget on the same conversation, and staff replies reach them there and by email.