Live chat channel

Updated August 24, 2026

A live-chat channel puts a chat button on your website. Visitors fill in a short pre-chat form, and their messages arrive in the Pluspoint Inbox as conversations owned by the team you choose. Pluspoint creates a contact record automatically for everyone who writes in.

Before you start

You need to be the account Owner, or belong to a team with full settings access.

At least one Team with messaging access must exist — see Teams.

You need a Brand or a Location to attach the channel to. Brand appearance also supplies the widget’s colours and logo, so set it up in Brands first.

To send missed-conversation alerts by SMS, WhatsApp or your own email address, connect that channel first.

You need somewhere to paste an HTML snippet into your website’s <head>.

Where to find it

Settings (left sidebar, footer area) → Channels tab, or go to https://app.pluspoint.io/account-settings/channels.

Create a live-chat channel

Select Add new channel.
Choose Live-chat and select Continue.
Enter a Channel name.
Choose the Team that owns the channel. Only teams with messaging access appear.
Choose Brand or Location, then pick one from the dropdown. Exactly one of the two is required.
Set up the pre-chat form under Contact details, the alerts under Notifications and the greeting under Conversation starters. Add a schedule under Business hours if you want one. The sections below cover each of these.
Select Continue. The channel is created, and the wizard moves on to the widget code step.

Choose which locations visitors can select

When the channel is linked to a Brand, an extra switch appears: Customize locations available for selection. It is off by default, so the visitor’s location dropdown offers every location in that brand.

Switch it on to narrow the list. A required Locations multi-select appears with that brand’s locations. Pick at least one, and visitors are offered only those.

When the channel is linked to a single Location instead, the switch does not appear and visitors see no location dropdown at all. The conversation always belongs to that location.

Configure the pre-chat form

The Contact details section decides what a visitor is asked for before the chat opens: switch Contact email, Contact phone and Contact name on or off, and mark them Required as needed.

Mark at least one of Contact email or Contact phone as Required, or the form will not save. The Message box is always shown and always required, and the visitor must accept the privacy policy.

Use the Segment multi-select in the same section to tag every contact created through this widget. You can create a new segment inline. See Segments for how segments are used elsewhere.

Set up missed-conversation notifications

If a visitor closes the tab after an agent has replied, Pluspoint can reach them on another channel so the reply is not lost.

Switch on Notify customers about missed conversations.
Choose a Phone notifications channel. The dropdown lists your connected SMS and WhatsApp (Beta) channels. WhatsApp Business channels are not offered here.
Choose an Email notifications channel. The dropdown lists your connected email channels plus the built-in Pluspoint Email option, which sends through Pluspoint’s own mail relay rather than one of your channels.
Set at least one of the two.

How the notification is routed:

If the contact has a phone number and a phone notifications channel is set and working, Pluspoint sends there.
Otherwise, if the contact has an email address and an email notifications channel is set, it sends by email.
Otherwise, if Pluspoint Email is selected, it sends through the Pluspoint relay.
Contacts who have unsubscribed are never notified.

Alerts go out roughly 10–20 minutes after an agent reply that the visitor has not answered.

Note If the notification channel you selected is disconnected, Pluspoint skips the alert but keeps your configuration. Notifications resume once the channel works again. If the selected channel is deleted, Pluspoint falls back to Pluspoint Email — but only when the pre-chat form requires an email address. Otherwise it switches Notify customers about missed conversations off.

This switch also controls whether you can start a chat from Pluspoint — see below.

Write the greeting

Under Conversation starters:

Title — required. The heading at the top of the pre-chat form.
Welcome message — required. It does not appear on the pre-chat form itself. It is the text of the call-out bubble that pops up next to the chat button shortly after the page loads. A visitor sees that bubble once per channel.

Set business hours

Switch on Enable business hours to answer automatically when nobody is available.

Write an Offline message. It is required once the switch is on.
For each day from Monday to Sunday, switch the day on and set the start and end time. A 24 hours option covers a day with no cut-off.
Each day takes one interval only. You cannot split a day around a lunch break here.

Outside the configured window, a visitor who starts a conversation or sends a message gets the offline message as an automatic reply in the chat. It repeats at most once every 5 minutes in the same conversation.

Warning Business hours are stored using the time zone of the browser that saved the channel. If somebody in a different time zone opens the channel and saves it, the effective hours shift. Have one person in the business’s own time zone own these settings.

The widget code step opens straight after you select Continue. You can come back to it later: open the channel from the Channels page and switch to the Widget code tab.

Set Live-chat widget position to Left or Right.
Optionally set Horizontal offset (px) and Vertical offset (px) to nudge the button away from other floating elements.
Select Copy code.
Paste the snippet into the <head> section of every page where the chat should appear.
Select Done.

The snippet looks like this, with your own channel id in place of the Xs:

<!-- Pluspoint script -->
    <script>"loading"!==document.readyState?init():document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",init);function init(){var t=document.createElement("script");t.id="pl-chat-widget",t.dataset.channelid="XXXXXXXXXX",t.dataset.align="right",t.src="https://app.pluspoint.io/widget/pl.widget.chat.min.js",document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(t)}</script>
<!-- End of Pluspoint script -->

Where you place the snippet in the page does not change where the button appears. Its position comes entirely from the settings above.

Setting	Values	Default	Notes
Live-chat widget position	Left, Right	Right	Sets `data-align` in the snippet.
Horizontal offset (px)	−20 to 200, whole numbers	Blank (0)	Added to the base 20 px from whichever edge the button sits on.
Vertical offset (px)	−20 to 200, whole numbers	Blank (0)	Added to the base 24 px from the bottom of the window.

Warning The position and both offsets are written into the snippet itself. If you change them later, copy the snippet again and replace the old one on your site. Otherwise those pages keep the values that were current when you copied.

Every live-chat channel also has a public URL. Link to the chat from an email, a QR code, a social profile or a microsite, with nothing to embed:

https://plsp.io/c/channel/<publicId>

<publicId> is the 10-character value of data-channelid in your snippet. Open the channel, go to the Widget code tab, and copy it from there.

Query parameter	Effect
`?locationId=<id>` or `?companyId=<id>`	Pre-selects a location and hides the location dropdown.
`?language=GB`	Forces the chat language, but only to a language your account’s locale offers — the same set the chat’s own language picker shows. Anything else is ignored: the chat falls back to the visitor’s browser language, then to your account’s language.

What the visitor sees

The pre-chat form asks for a Location, but only when more than one location applies and none was pinned by the URL.

Attachments are allowed in the chat, up to 5 MB per file. When an agent resolves the conversation, the visitor can open a fresh one.

Colours, fonts and the logo come from brand appearance settings: the brand the channel is linked to, or the brand that owns the linked location. If neither supplies them, Pluspoint falls back to the location’s logo, and then to its own defaults. Change them in Brands; the channel itself has no appearance fields.

Start a live chat conversation from Pluspoint

You can open a live-chat conversation from a contact or a survey response. It works only when Notify customers about missed conversations is switched on for that channel; otherwise the live-chat channel does not appear in the channel picker. You also choose a location for the conversation. The customer receives your first message through the notification channel you configured.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Widget does not appear on the site	The snippet is missing from that page, or it is on a page your CMS strips scripts from.	Paste the snippet into the `<head>` of every page that needs chat and confirm it survives publishing.
Widget appears on the wrong side or overlaps another button	The snippet on the site is older than your current position and offset settings.	Copy the snippet again from the Widget code tab and replace it on the site.
Visitors see a “service paused” page instead of the chat	The account’s subscription has expired or is over its limits.	Resolve it in Billing and plans.
Business hours apply at the wrong time of day	The hours were saved from a browser in another time zone.	Have someone in the business’s time zone reopen the channel and save the schedule again.
Live-chat channel missing from the new-conversation picker	Notify customers about missed conversations is off.	Switch it on and set at least one notification channel.
Customers never receive missed-conversation alerts	The notification channel is disconnected, or the contacts have unsubscribed.	Reconnect the channel; unsubscribed contacts are never notified by design.
A visitor’s location choice is missing or wrong	The channel is linked to a single location, or Customize locations available for selection limits the list.	Link the channel to the brand and review the Locations multi-select.