Chat Widget: dynamic time-based greeting for the welcome message. Keep it to one line — titles are what people scan when deciding whether to upvote.
F
Fuad Emon
THE PROBLEM
The Chat Widget's welcome message is a single static text field. Every visitor sees the same line no matter when they arrive — 6 AM or 11 PM. There is no merge tag, no conditional logic, and no way to pass a greeting value through the embed snippet at load time. Confirmed by GHL Support (ticket #6147878).
THE REQUEST
Allow the welcome message to change based on time of day, the way ChatGPT and Claude greet users:
- Morning → "Good morning! How can I help you today?"
- Afternoon → "Good afternoon! How can I help you today?"
- Evening → "Good evening! How can I help you today?"
POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATIONS — any one of these would solve it:
- A merge tag such as {{time_of_day_greeting}} usable in the welcome message field
- Multiple welcome messages with configurable time windows, so we define the ranges and copy ourselves
- A documented widget config option — passing a welcomeMessage value at initialization — so we can compute it client-side
IMPORTANT: USE VISITOR LOCAL TIME
The greeting must be calculated from the visitor's browser time, not the sub-account timezone. Most sites get traffic across multiple regions, so an account-level calculation would show the wrong greeting to a large share of visitors. "Good evening" at 9 AM is worse than no greeting at all.
WHY IT MATTERS
The chat widget is the first touchpoint for inbound leads on most sites. A time-aware greeting makes it read as live and human rather than canned, which affects whether visitors engage with the bot at all.
The only workaround today is injecting custom JavaScript to rewrite the greeting in the DOM after the widget mounts. That is unsupported, breaks whenever the widget markup changes, and has to be maintained per site — not viable across multiple sub-accounts.
If you run the chat widget for clients, please upvote.
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