It should not follow people everywhere
A chat widget on every page of every visit gets ignored, or worse, closed on the first page and never opened again.
These settings are mostly about taking it off the pages where it is in the way, and choosing when it appears on the ones where it is not.
Which pages it shows on
Show or hide the widget by page address.
The usual patterns:
- Everywhere except the checkout, so nothing distracts a buyer mid-payment
- Only on service and pricing pages, where questions actually come up
- Off the blog, if your blog traffic is not your customer
When it appears
It can appear the moment the page loads, or after a delay you set.
And you choose what the visitor sees first: just the launcher, a greeting bubble with a few suggested questions next to it, or the chat opening by itself on desktop.
A greeting with suggested questions gets more conversations started. Opening automatically gets more still, and irritates more people. Worth testing on your own traffic.
Working hours
Set your regular weekly hours, and add exceptions for specific dates — a bank holiday, a week off, a one-off early close.
Worth saying plainly: most people using this widget want the opposite of a schedule. The whole point is that the agent covers the hours you cannot. Schedules are for the cases where you would rather the chat was not there outside business hours at all.