Customer Chat Plugin (beta)

The Messenger Platform's customer chat plugin allows you to integrate your Messenger experience directly into your website. This allows your customers to interact with your business anytime with the same personalized, rich-media experience they get in Messenger.

The customer chat plugin automatically loads recent chat history between the person and your business, meaning recent interactions with your business on messenger.com, in the Messenger app, or in the customer chat plugin on your website will be visible. This helps create a single experience for your customers, and enables you to continue the conversation even after they have left your webpage. No need to capture their information to follow up, just use the same conversation in Messenger.

Contents

• Feature Support
  • Browser Support
  • Message Type & Template Support
• Including the SDK
  • Localization & Internationalization
• Setting Up the Plugin
• Customizing the Plugin
  • Using the Setup Tool
  • Disabling the Persistent Menu
• User Login
• Caching Behavior
• Detecting Message Origin
• Wordpress Plugin
• Troubleshooting Tips

Feature Support

Browser Support

The customer chat plugin supports all desktop and mobile browsers except Messenger in-app browsers.

Message Type & Template Support

Currently, the customer chat plugin supports the follow message types and structured message templates:

Including the SDK

To use the customer chat plugin, you must include a version of the Facebook JavaScript SDK that contains the Customer Chat SDK in the page where the plugin will be rendered.

For instructions on including the SDK, see Customer Chat SDK.

Localization & Internationalization

To take advantage of internationalization, including automatic language translation, you need to change the locale of the SDK to match the locale of your site. Specifically, you need to change en_US to a supported locale code when initiating the SDK.

For more information, see Localization with Social Plugins and JavaScript SDK.

Dynamic Controls of the Plugin

We also provide APIs that allow you to dynamically control certain behaviors of the plugin such as opening and closing the dialog.

For more information, see Customer Chat SDK.

Setting Up the Plugin

To include the customer chat plugin on your webpage, you can either use the setup tool or setup using developer steps.

Option 1: Using the Setup Tool

For Page Admins, the Messenger Platform also provides an easy setup tool for customizing your customer chat plugin. To use the setup tool, do the following:

1. Go to Page Settings > Messenger Platform
2. In the 'Customer Chat Plugin' section, click the 'Set Up' Button.

The setup tool provides a simple UI for customizing the greeting message, theme color, displayed response time, and setting the whitelisted domains for the plugin.

On completion, the setup tool automatically generates the code snippets that you can copy/paste to include the customer chat plugin in your webpage.

Option 2: Setup Using Developer Steps

To include the customer chat plugin on your webpage, do the following:

1. Whitelist the domain of your website

   For security reasons, the plugin will only render when loaded on a domain that you have whitelisted. Refer to whitelisted_domains reference to learn how to whitelist your domain programmatically.

   Domain Name and HTTPS Required

   Domains must meet the following requirements to be whitelisted:

   • Served over HTTPS

   • Use a fully qualified domain name, such as https://www.messenger.com/. IP addresses and localhost are not supported for whitelisting.

   Businesses whose Messenger experience is provided by a service provider, will not have access to the page token generator in app settings because they do not own the Facebook app. In this case, you may add or remove whitelisted domains via Page settings. To whitelist a domain, do the following:

   

   1. Click Settings at the top of your Page
   2. Click Messenger Platform on the left
   3. Edit whitelisted domains for your page in the Whitelisted Domains section

2. Include the plugin on your webpage

   To add the plugin to your webpage, include a div with the following attributes in your HTML:

   <div class="fb-customerchat"
    page_id="<PAGE_ID>">
   </div>

   By default, the greeting dialog will be shown on desktop and be hidden on mobile. To customize the greeting dialog behavior, you can use the greeting_dialog_display and 'greeting_dialog_delay' attributes.

   Recommended Positioning

   We highly suggest not changing the default position of the customer chat plugin from the bottom-right corner of your page.

   For a complete list of attributes, see the Customer Chat Plugin reference.

3. Optional. Handle the messaging_postbacks event for new conversations

   If a new conversation is started via the plugin, and your bot has set up the get started button, we will send a messaging_postbacks webhook event to your webhook when the user clicks the get started button.

   If the ref attribute is set in the include for the customer chat plugin, it will be included in the postback event.

4. Optional. Handle the messaging_referrals event for existing conversations

   For existing conversations, if the ref attribute is set in the include for the customer chat plugin, a messaging_referrals webhook event will be sent to your webhook when the conversation is continued via the plugin.

   The ref can be any string and can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, you could use it to keep track of which customers have engaged with your business via the plugin.

Customizing the Plugin

The customer chat plugin supports the following customizations. All customizations are set as an attribute when the plugin is included on your webpage:

Disabling the Persistent Menu

There may be cases where it is preferable to disable the persistent menu for your bot in the customer chat plugin. To do this, add "disabled_surfaces": ["CUSTOMER_CHAT_PLUGIN"] when you set your persistent menu:

{
  "persistent_menu":[
    {
      "locale":"default",
      "disabled_surfaces": ["CUSTOMER_CHAT_PLUGIN"],
      "composer_input_disabled": false,      
      "call_to_actions":[
        {
          "title":"My Account",
          "type":"postback",
          "payload":"PAYBILL_PAYLOAD"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

User Login

If the user is already logged in to their Facebook account, they will be able to start chatting with your bot right away. If they are not logged in, a default welcome message will be display, and they will be prompted to log in or create a new Facebook account.

Caching Behavior

By default, the greeting dialog will be shown on desktop and minimized on mobile. Users can also click to show or to minimize the dialog. This state is cached on the browser and persists even when the browser is closed and reopened.

Detecting Message Origin

At times, it may be necessary to determine whether a user is engaging with your business using the customer chat plugin. To enable this, the Messenger Platform will include a "source": "customer_chat_plugin" property for all postback events and in the tags array of the message payload for all messages sent from the plugin:

"message": {
  "mid":"mid.14577641449818:41d102a3e1ae206a38",
  "text":"hello, from customer chat!",
  "tags": [
    {
      "source": "customer_chat_plugin"
    }
  ]
}

Wordpress Plugin

To make it easier to integrate the customer chat plugin into Wordpress sites, we offer the official Messenger customer chat Wordpress plugin on wordpress.org.

Troubleshooting Tips

If you're having trouble getting the plugin to render properly, try the tips below:

• If you see a console error like "Refused to display *** in a frame because an ancestor violates the following Content Security Policy directive: ***", check that the domain of the page the plugin is being rendered on has been whitelisted. Also make sure you didn't set the Referrer-Policy header to no-referrer.
• The Firefox Facebook Container Add-On prevents the plugin from showing up. Remove the add on if you want the plugin to render.
• Firefox desktop private browsers (version 63 and above) and Firefox mobile browsers block content tracking by default which will prevent the plugin from rendering. Turn off content blocking (click the gray shield in the search bar) to see the plugin render.