Adding live chat to your site with ICTDesk is genuinely a coffee-break task, call it ten minutes start to finish. Spin up a workspace, copy one widget snippet, paste it just before your closing body tag, and the chat bubble shows up for visitors. That’s the shape of it. The rest of this guide just fills in each step, from signing up to fielding your first real conversation.
Before You Start
You need two things and that’s it: a way into your website’s HTML (or your CMS admin, so WordPress counts), and an ICTDesk account. Don’t have one? Grab a free 14-day trial, no card required. Trial or paid plan, the steps below don’t change.
Step 1: Create Your ICTDesk Workspace
Open the ICTDesk portal and register. Sign-up asks you to name your workspace and set a support email, nothing fiddly. That workspace becomes your home base, the place every chat, agent, and visitor record lands. And if you’re handling support for a couple of different brands or clients? ICTDesk is multi-tenant, so each one gets its own workspace under a single login.
Step 2: Set Up Your Brand and Greeting
Crack open the widget settings. Pick your bubble color, type in your company name, and write the line visitors read when the chat opens. My advice: make that greeting specific. Something like “Hi, ask us anything about pricing or setup” pulls more replies than a limp “How can we help?”, because it actually tells people what you’re useful for.
Got white-label on your plan? You can also peel off the ICTDesk branding and run the widget on your own domain, so it reads as part of your site instead of an obvious add-on.
Step 3: Copy Your Live Chat Widget Code
Still in the widget settings, find the install section. ICTDesk hands you a single script tag tied to your workspace key. It looks like this:
<script src="https://service.ictdesk.net/api/widget/YOUR_WORKSPACE_KEY/livedesk.js"></script>Your real snippet swaps in a unique key for YOUR_WORKSPACE_KEY. Grab the whole line. That one script loads the bubble, opens a real-time WebSocket back to your workspace, and quietly handles the rest.
Step 4: Add the Code to Your Website
Paste the snippet right before the closing </body> tag on every page where you want chat. How you get it there depends on your setup:
- Plain HTML site: open each page template (or your shared footer include) and paste the snippet before
</body>. - WordPress: use your theme’s footer-scripts option, or a header-and-footer plugin, so it loads site-wide without touching theme files.
- Shopify, Wix, or other builders: hunt for a “custom code” or “footer scripts” field in the theme settings and paste it there.
Save, publish, reload. The chat bubble should pop into the corner within a few seconds.
Step 5: Set Up the AI Chatbot and Quick Replies
Before you bring agents in, teach ICTDesk about your business. In the AI bot settings, feed it your knowledge base articles and the answers you give most often. It uses those to field routine questions on its own, around the clock, so visitors get help even at 2am when nobody’s online. Hit something the bot can’t answer, and it hands the conversation to a human agent with the full chat history attached, so the visitor never has to start over.
While you’re at it, set up canned replies for the questions you answer every single day. They keep things fast and consistent without you retyping the same paragraph for the hundredth time.
Step 6: Invite Your Agents and Install the Mobile App
Add your team from the agents section. Everyone gets their own login and shows up in the shared inbox, so chats can be assigned out or just grabbed by whoever’s free. Your agents can also install the ICTDesk app for iOS and Android, which means a chat doesn’t have to wait until someone’s back at their desk.
Step 7: Test It and Go Live
Open your site in a private browser window and start a chat as if you were a visitor. Make sure the message reaches your agent inbox, that you can reply, and that the AI bot answers a sample question sensibly. Glance at the visitor details panel too, ICTDesk shows which page they’re on and where they came from, which gives your agents something to work with. Everything checks out? You’re live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need coding skills to install ICTDesk live chat?
Not really. You copy one script tag and paste it into your footer. On WordPress or a website builder, a footer-scripts field or plugin does the job without you ever opening a code file.
Will the chat widget slow down my website?
No. The widget loads asynchronously, so it never blocks your page from rendering. Your content shows up first and the bubble follows a moment later, with no load-time hit your visitors would notice.
Can I use ICTDesk live chat on more than one website?
Yes, that’s where multi-tenant pays off. Run separate workspaces for different sites or clients, each with its own widget, agents, and settings, all from one account.
What happens to chats when my team is offline?
The AI bot keeps fielding routine questions from your knowledge base. If someone asks something it can’t handle, the message lands in your inbox so an agent can pick it up once they’re back.
Can agents reply from a phone?
They can. ICTDesk has iOS and Android apps, so your team can read and answer chats from wherever they happen to be.
Related Resources
- ICTDesk Features, AI chatbot, live chat, visitor analytics, mobile app, and white-label options
- ICTDesk Pricing, plans starting at $9.99/month plus a full-ownership license
- What Is Help Desk Software?, how ticketing, live chat, and self-service fit together
- What Is a Ticketing System?, the difference between live chat and structured ticket support
Ready to talk to your visitors in real time? Start your free 14-day trial, or contact our team if you’d like a hand with setup.