Getting started

What is Chat Desk?

Chat Desk is an easy-to-use web-based application that enables real-time communication with your customers via a single web interface. Your clients will be able to contact you via multiple channels (e.g. WhatsApp, Clickatell’s live Web Chat) while your customer service agents can respond and manage these conversations from one convenient virtual service desk. Chat Desk also makes monitoring queries, chats and agent performance easier so you can ensure your customers are receiving the best and most efficient service.

Activating the Chat Desk product gives you access to the following:

• Unified Chat Desk – agents can respond to customer queries coming in from multiple channels, view chat history, add notes, chat tags, ticket links, and transfer chats
• Rich media management – agents can interact with customers using multiple rich media sources, enabling deeper conversations with users
• Supervisor assist – a chat desk supervisor can monitor agent and chat activities in real-time, they can also send notifications to customers
• Agent management and scheduling – the supervisor can manage agents, define agent chat capacity, group agents into departments, and describe how chats should be routed to agents
• Customization – add your company’s logo and brand colors, set up customer satisfaction surveys, create auto-responders, manage chat transcripts and add agent name to auto responders

Channels currently available on Chat Desk: 

• Web Chat 
• WhatsApp
• 1-way SMS
• Facebook Messenger

Getting started with Chat Desk

Step 1: Register your Clickatell account & log in to portal

Sign up and create your free Clickatell account. Once you’ve verified your account, log in to your Clickatell portal. The first page you see is the Launchpad which is the home page that gives you an overview of the channels and products available in Clickatell and also gives you a summary of all the channels and products you have activated on your account. From here you can activate and set up the channels and products that you want to utilize. You can also use the left panel to navigate to the specific sections for more details.

Step 2: Set up Touch

From the Launchpad, in the ‘Touch‘ section, click on the ‘Set up Touch‘ button. Follow the wizard to add business details, brand details and Web Chat details, and click ‘Finish‘ in the last step.

Step 3: Activate channels

Once the setup wizard has been completed, your Touch Integrations page opens. This shows all available channels that can be integrated with your Chat Desk. You can also navigate to this page by selecting ‘Touch → Configure Touch’ from the left-hand panel. You will notice that the Web Chat channel is already ‘Active‘ by default.

Activate other desired channels individually by clicking the ‘Configure‘ button in the relevant tile. This opens a wizard assisting you to set up the channel. Once set up, you can edit its settings by clicking the ‘Manage‘ button. Toggles in the table below allow you to disable/enable the individual channels at any point.

Customers will be able to contact your business via any of the activated channels, while your agents respond to them from within Chat Desk.

Note: When you sign up for Touch, you automatically get one free agent seat to use with all channels. You can add as many agent users as you like, but only one agent will be able to log in per agent seat at any given time. To upgrade your account and add more agents to enable simultaneous login for multiple agents, click on ‘Upgrade’ in the top header and choose how many agent seats you want to add. Choose your billing preference and add to your cart. Your seats will be added to your cart and you can proceed to checkout to make payment.

Step 4: Manage settings and preferences (optional)

In the panel on the left, click on ‘Touch‘.

Use the sub-menu to navigate to different Chat Desk settings and tools:

• Configure Touch – opens the Touch Integrations page (see Step 3)
• Launch Chat Desk – opens the web application that agents will use to converse with customers (see Step 5 below)
• Departments Management – set up different departments and group desk agents with the expertise to deal with your customer’s specific needs, e.g. Sales, Technical Support, General
• Chat console – opens a ‘supervisor’ view where you can monitor and manage chats, agent performance and availability, and analyze channel and customer data
• Manage Agent users – add new agents and manage the personal details as well as the roles assigned to existing agents; set agents as being ‘Active’ or not
• Touch Preferences – edit your Chat Desk details such as business details, support hours, and brand look and feel, manage your chat transcripts, auto-responders and surveys, chat tags, and other miscellaneous settings

Step 5: Launch Agent Chat Desk

In the panel on the left, navigate to ‘Touch → Launch Chat Desk‘. This opens the Chat Desk web application that your customer service agents will use to interact with your customers when they contact you via any of the channels you’ve activated in Step 3 above. When you add agents via the Clickatell portal, each agent will receive an email with a link that gives them access to the Chat Desk web application only (i.e. they will not have access to the Clickatell portal) unless you update their roles and permissions (‘Touch → Manage Agent users’).