Knowing your visitors

The more an agent knows about who they're chatting with, the faster they can help. Live Chat gives you three ways to add context.

Pre-chat fields

In Live Chat settings you can choose custom fields to collect before a chat starts — for example a dropdown for "Topic" or a text field for "Order number". They're drawn from your project's shared custom fields, so the same definitions power your widget, forms, and chat.

Visitors fill them in on the pre-chat screen, and the answers carry through to the feedback item the conversation becomes.

Identify logged-in users (Boot API)

If chat runs inside an app where people are signed in, you can tell UserHero who they are. Add a call after the widget script:

<script src="https://userhero.co/chat-widget.js" data-key="pk_live_your_key"></script>
<script>
  UserHeroChat('boot', {
    user: { userId: 'u_123', email: 'ada@example.com', name: 'Ada Lovelace' },
    attributes: { plan: 'pro', signupDate: '2024-02-01' }
  });
</script>

• user — identity fields. An email means the agent (and the converted feedback) can follow up, and it links the conversation to the customer's profile.
• attributes — anything else useful to your agents (plan, MRR, role…). They show on the conversation and the feedback item.

The Boot API has three methods:

UserHeroChat('identify', { user: { userId: 'u_123', email: 'ada@example.com' } });
UserHeroChat('shutdown');

Verified identity

Anything sent from the browser is, by nature, self-reported. To make identity trusted, sign it on your server and pass the signature along:

UserHeroChat('boot', {
  user: { userId: 'u_123', email: 'ada@example.com' },
  identity: { payloadJson: '<the exact JSON your server signed>', hmac: '<signature>' }
});

Live Chat uses the same signing secret and identity payload as the Embedded Portal, so if you've set that up you're already done. If not, follow:

• Identity payload — what to put in the payload.
• HMAC signing — how to sign it on your server.

The customer card

However identity arrives — pre-chat, the Boot API, or an agent typing it in — if it matches someone you've heard from before, the console shows a customer card: their name, company, attributes, how many feedback items they've sent, and their most recent ones, with a link to the full profile. Agents can also correct or add a visitor's name, email, phone, and notes right from the panel.

This is visible to your team only — it's never shown to the visitor.