Allow New Contacts to Open Chats in Messenger

Updated by Stephen Boss

The default behavior of Messenger is to only allow contacts that exist in your PSA to initiate chats. This allows you to validate all the users opening support inquiries as belonging to that company.

This guide will show you how to override this default behavior and configure Messenger at the client-level to allow new contacts to open chats.

Allowing new contacts to open chats will only work by overriding the default Messenger settings at the client-level and deploying Messenger to that customer via their specific App ID.

Enable New Contact Chat Flow

  1. Navigate to Admin Panel > Clients
  2. On the Company tab, select the client where you wish to deploy Messenger with a New Contact flow.
  3. From the client's screen, navigate to the Settings tab.
  4. Check the box for Override Parent Settings.
  5. By default, the Client will inherit the parent-level Messenger configuration, if you want to override those settings, do so here.
  6. When you are done modifying settings for the client, check the box for Allow new contacts to open chats.
  7. Click Save.

Test the New Contact Chat Flow (Optional)

Once you have enabled the setting at the Client-level, you can test the new flow by using the Messenger emulator on the right-hand side of the screen.

If you test the new chat flow, know that the service will create a new contact in your PSA once you successfully authenticate. You may want to clean up that record after you are done testing.

Deploy Messenger to the Client

The new contact chat flow will only apply to Messenger for Web or Desktop deployments that are deployed through the client-level App ID. If you previously installed Messenger using your parent-level App ID, you will want to redeploy using the client-specific App ID.

To Fetch the Client-Level App ID

  1. Navigate to Admin Panel > Clients
  2. On the Company tab, select the client where you wish to deploy Messenger with a New Contact flow.
  3. From the client's screen, navigate to the Installation tab.
  4. Copy the string under App ID
  5. Follow our Deployment Guides, use the App ID you copied in the previous step in your deployment.

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