Tried the Chat Widget but lots of issues, unsure how to proceed

[joel_hellman]

We are looking to implement PureCloud Web Chat to handle our customer's various support request. We want to serve chat on our company web page.

I have looked at and tested the Web Chat widget at https://developer.mypurecloud.com/api/webchat/ but I have found several issues making we doubt how and if we can use it.

To take some examples where the I feel the Chat Widget falls short:

1. It's not responsive and it looks and works terrible on mobile, almost unusable. About 90% of our visitors are connecting via mobile though.
2. When our support agents are not online, we don't want to offer chat to our visitors. I cannot find any built-in mechanism that connect the Chat Widget to agent presence in a PureCloud queue.
3. Same as above, but with schedules: we want to connect the Chat Widget to a Schedule defined in PureCloud.
4. No built in estimated queue time before requesting a chat.
5. No built in remaining queue time estimation for visitor waiting to be served.
6. No browser alerts to the visitor of new chat message.
7. No way to brand the chat widget as its an iframe from cross domain.
8. Haven't found a way to hook into a chat and push messages to the visitor, such as when customer has been in queue for a significant time, when business hours are over and chat will close etc.

So I wonder if there is a roadmap for the The Chat Widget?
And would it be a good idea to try to build our own widget interface, using chat APIs?
Are others leveraging 3rd integrations right now perhaps?

[anon39326996]

Thanks for passing along the feedback. Those limitations are on the roadmap and we are working through addressing those, starting with the ability to specify schedules and close down chat in off hours or during holidays. I'd be glad to meet with you and show you what we have planned and how we are approaching it in more detail.

One thing you could do is leverage our 3rd party chat APIs which allow you to still route chats via PureCloud, but using your preferred 3rd party solution. More details are here: https://developer.mypurecloud.com/api/rest/v2/conversations/third-party-object-routing.html