We’re so happy to have you joining us as a CometChat customer and can’t wait to see your customer engagement take off!
In this article we'll take a take a quick look at:
Signing Up For an Account
If you haven’t signed up for your account yet, it takes just a couple minutes!
When you sign up and log in to CometChat, you’ll be taken to your Account page. Here at the Account level you won’t need to do much, but it’s good to keep in mind that this is where your contact info lives and this is where you would go to reset your password if needed. Whoever signs up for the account becomes the owner of the account - and that email address will be associated with billing. You can add other team members later in the process, but whoever you want to be in charge of the account and billing should be the email address used to create the account.
Creating an App
Most of what you’ll be focused on will happen within your Applications, which you'll need to create. Your account is structured so you can have multiple Apps. Even if you only need one production App, we always recommend having an additional staging App where you do your development and testing. So, go ahead and create one by clicking on that purple button!
When you create an App, you'll notice you're asked to select a Region. This is where your App will be hosted on our servers. You'll want to select the region that is closest in proximity to your users as that will lead to the best user experience.
All Apps are automatically associated with our free Build plan. This plan comes with all of our features enabled so that you can test anything and everything you might want to include in your live environment.
Apps associated with the Build Plan are limited to 100 users. When you launch your chat feature, the App which will be integrated with your live production environment will need to be associated with a paid subscription plan in order for more than 100 users to access it. If you're working with an Account Executive, they'll help get this set up correctly. Otherwise, you can check out our prices and choose your plan from right within your App dashboard. Just go to Manage Plans and Billing.
Your staging App can remain under the free plan forever. If you need a temporary increase on user limits for testing purposes in your staging App, reach out to our support team for help.
Once you’ve created your App, you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this:
There is a lot to see and do inside your App. This is the overview page where you’ll find usage and analytics for your App. This will be important once you’re live so you can keep track of how many users are taking advantage of your new chat feature. This is also how your bill is calculated, so these numbers will help you make sure you’re on the right plan and alert you if you need to upgrade to add more users or more concurrency.
Pro Tip: A user is considered active when they connect to the CometChat websocket. Take some time to think about when you want to establish this connection for your users, this decision can make a big difference to how many Monthly Active Users you have.
Pro Tip: Concurrency is based on active connections to the websocket at the same time. If the nature of your product means that most or all of your users are online at the same time, you may want to consider a higher concurrency plan. Reach out to sales for more info.
The menu on the left will take you anywhere you need to go in your App. Add team members here to allow developers and admins access to your Apps.
The lefthand menu is also where you can find your App ID and Auth/API keys under Credentials. You can manage Users, create Groups, and assign Roles for your Users. You can see Chat and Call History. This is also where you'll enable any Extensions you're going to be using. You can toggle extensions on and off, but you may need to upgrade or request an add-on if an extension doesn't come with your plan. Unlike in the developer App, not all features will be accessible in your production App unless they come with your plan.
Starting Integration
And, finally, you can start what you really came here to do - integrate chat into your product!
This section is where you’ll go to make the magic of chat happen within your App. Decide whether to go for our low-code widget or highly customizable SDKs depending on your needs. Once you've decided you can follow the links to our documentation page to get started developing. Our documentation is thorough and comprehensive and will be your best friend as you're building your chat feature!
As you work on your integration, you have different ways to get help. You can chat with support from within your App - just look for the purple "Contact Us" button in the bottom right corner of your screen. You can also submit a ticket on our Help Page. And customers in our highest tiers can get personalized implementation support - if you'd like to learn more, contact our sales team. If you decide that you just don't have the time and resources to build what you really want, we have partners who can help you. Whatever it takes, we're here to help you go live with chat and get your customers talking.
When you're done building and testing your chat feature, there's nothing you need from us to go live with your customers, just release into your production environment (after thorough testing of course) and start engaging your users!
Reminder: Do not launch your chat feature under the Free Developer Plan! You will quickly run into issues with too many users trying to access your App.
FAQs:
Q: Why would I need more than one production App?
A: We offer something called multi-tenancy. This is primarily for B2B customers who have multiple clients of their own and want to have separate applications for each customer while only paying one CometChat bill each month. This allows you to keep data separate and customize features accordingly. If you think you need a multi-tenancy plan, reach out to our sales team.
Comments
0 commentsPlease sign in to leave a comment.