Greeting and nudge

Two short messages beside the chat button that invite a visitor to ask. When each one appears, what it needs, and how your site passes the consent the second one needs.

Most visitors never click a chat button on their own. Two short messages can invite them: a greeting a few seconds after they arrive, and a second nudge later in their visit. Both sit just above the button, in its colour, with a cross to close them.

Both are off until you switch them on, under Settings on the agent, in the card Greeting and nudge. They are part of every plan.

The greeting

It appears after After (seconds), 8 unless you choose another number, up to 600. With 0 it appears at once.
It appears on a page the visitor reached from another site: from a search engine, an advert or a link in an e-mail. The browser tells the page where the visitor came from, and the widget checks that on the page itself. Nothing is sent or kept for it.
Because of that, a visitor who typed your address or used a bookmark gets no greeting, and one moving from page to page on your site does not get it again on every page. A reload counts as arriving again, so after one it can come back.
On a site that passes the visitor's consent (below), those limits go: it appears once per visit, on the first page where it may.
Greeting text takes up to 140 characters. Left empty, it says the first line of your welcome message.

The second nudge

When is one of two:
- On a page of the visit: on page 4 of the visit unless you choose another, from 2 to 20.
- After a time on the site: 60 seconds after the visit began unless you choose another number, from 10 to 3,600, counted across pages.
It appears once per visit, a moment after the page has loaded. If the greeting is still showing then, the nudge waits for the next page rather than replace it.
It needs your site to pass the visitor's consent. Counting pages, or the time since the visit began, means keeping a small value in the visitor's browser from one page to the next. Without the signal described below, the nudge never appears, and the settings card says so.
Nudge text takes up to 140 characters. Left empty, it asks in the widget's language whether it can help the visitor find something.

For both

Where decides on which pages they may appear: every page, only pages whose address contains one of a list, or every page except those. Put one part of an address per line, such as /products, up to 20. Capitals make no difference. The rule is checked when a message is due, so it also holds on a site that changes pages without reloading.
They appear on computers only, unless you switch on Also on phones and tablets. On a phone a message covers more of the page.
A click on a message, or on the button while a message is showing, opens the chat on that message. The chat's first line is the message itself, and the agent knows that the visitor's first words may be a reply to it, so "yes please" is answered as one.
Closing a message, or opening the chat, ends both for that page. On a site that passes consent, it ends them for the rest of the visit.
The Preview beside the settings shows the button with the chat Closed as you edit either message.
The iframe snippet shows neither. It puts the chat in your page, with no button to show them beside.

Why it is needed. Belgian and European rules count keeping anything in a visitor's browser, even for one visit, as storage that needs consent, unless the visitor asked for the service it serves. A visitor who has not touched the chat has asked for nothing yet. So the widget keeps nothing in the browser before the visitor uses it, unless your site says it may.

Which consent is yours to decide. The value is used to time a message that invites the visitor to talk, which is closer to marketing than to something the visitor asked for. The category you tie it to decides how many visitors ever see the nudge. Check with whoever looks after your cookie notice.

When the visitor accepts, your banner makes one call:

ChatterLab("consent", true);

And when they take it back:

ChatterLab("consent", false);

Taking it back clears what the widget kept and stops the nudge.

A banner often answers before the widget's script has loaded. Put this line above both, so that a call made early waits for the script:

<script>window.ChatterLab=window.ChatterLab||function(){(window.ChatterLab.q=window.ChatterLab.q||[]).push(arguments)};</script>

Some sites load every script only once the visitor has accepted. Then say so on the tag itself, with data-consent:

<script src="https://YOUR-ADDRESS/w.js" data-agent="YOUR-AGENT-ID" data-consent="true" async></script>

Loading the script this way also keeps the button away until the visitor has accepted, although the button itself needs no consent.

Example: Cookiebot

Cookiebot calls a function of yours when the visitor accepts, and again on every later page for a visitor who accepted, and another when they decline:

<script>
  function CookiebotCallback_OnAccept() {
    ChatterLab("consent", Cookiebot.consent.marketing);
  }
  function CookiebotCallback_OnDecline() {
    ChatterLab("consent", false);
  }
</script>

If your site already has these two functions, add the line to each. Use Cookiebot.consent.preferences or Cookiebot.consent.statistics instead of marketing if that is the category you chose. With any other banner, make the same call from wherever it tells your page that the visitor accepted or declined.

What is kept in the browser

Only on a site that passes consent, and only while at least one of the messages is on. It is one value in the browser's session storage, chatterlab-visit- followed by your agent's id, and it is gone when the tab is closed:

What	Why
When the visit began	For a nudge a number of seconds into the visit
How many pages have been seen	For a nudge on a page of the visit
Whether the greeting and the nudge have been shown, and whether the visitor closed one or opened the chat	So that neither comes back in the same visit

Nothing in it identifies the visitor, and none of it is sent to us.

What is recorded

Each conversation records what opened the chat it began in: the button, the greeting or the nudge. How often the chat is opened is counted per hour, in the same three parts. Both come from the request the widget makes anyway when a visitor opens the chat. Nothing is sent only to be counted, and nothing that identifies a visitor is kept with the count. One address adds at most 20 opens an hour, so that a script asking for the chat in a loop cannot swell the figure. Both are on the agent's Overview, under Widget, with the conversations each message started.