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Hope Chat
Hope Chat is your own live chat. Visitors send you messages, your team replies, and every conversation lands in your Engage inbox next to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You set it up yourself in Engage - no developer needed - on the Hope chat tab.
There are two ways to use it:
- Widget - a chat button that floats on a website you already have. You copy a small snippet and paste it into your site. Add a Chat Widget to Your Website →
- Web page - a ready-made chat page that Hope Chat hosts for you, with its own web address. No website required - you just share the link. Create a Hosted Chat Page →
server-to-server integrations built by developers. It is not available yet and is not covered in these guides.
Create a chat
Every chat starts the same way, whichever type you pick:
- Open the Hope chat tab in Engage.
- Click Add new chat (or Create new chat if you have none yet).
- In the New hope chat window, upload a thumbnail image, type a Title, and choose the type - Widget or Web page.
- Click Create.
Your new chat opens in the editor, where you configure how it looks and where it runs. The next steps depend on the type - follow the matching guide above.
Good to know
- Everything saves automatically. As you edit, you will see Saving... then Saved. There is no Publish button.
- Each chat moves through statuses: Draft (just created) → Ready for publishing (ready to install) → Active (installed and receiving messages). A widget becomes Active once its snippet is live on your site; a web page becomes Active once its address and page details are filled in.
- Each chat has an ID. You can copy it from the chat's header. The widget snippet already includes this ID for you - you do not need to type it anywhere.
- Duplicate or delete a chat from the ... menu in its header. Deleting is permanent.
Where your conversations appear
You do not answer chats on the Hope chat tab. Every visitor message shows up in your normal Engage inbox / Interaction Feed as a conversation you can reply to, exactly like a direct message from any other channel. You can filter the feed by the Hope Chat source to see just these conversations.
While a visitor has the chat open, your replies reach them in real time. If they close it and come back later, their earlier conversation is still there.