Identify signed-in visitors

Why identify

When a customer is signed in on your site, tell Chatyol who they are. They skip the pre-chat form, and your agents see their name, email and phone next to the chat.

// After the visitor signs in on your site:
window.Chatyol?.identify({
  extId: '4821',             // your user id
  name: 'Jane Doe',
  email: 'jane@example.com',
  phone: '+1 758 555 0100',
  sig: '…',                  // see below
});

user_id and user_hash are accepted as other names for extId and sig.

Sign it on your server

Without a signature, anyone could call identify with someone else's email. So send sig: the HMAC-SHA256, in hex, of extId (or of the email when there is no id) with your website's secret key.

The secret key is in Chatyol's settings. Keep it on your server: it must never reach the browser.

Node.js

import { createHmac } from 'node:crypto';

const sig = createHmac('sha256', process.env.CHATYOL_SECRET).update(String(user.id)).digest('hex');

PHP

$sig = hash_hmac('sha256', (string) $user->id, env('CHATYOL_SECRET'));

Python

import hmac, hashlib

sig = hmac.new(CHATYOL_SECRET.encode(), str(user.id).encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()

Render sig into the page next to the user's details, then call identify.

Hosted chat links

The same signature works on hosted chat links: add &ext_id=…&sig=… (or &email=…&sig=…). See Hosted chat page.