Cobrowse website requirements

Cobrowse website requirements

For cobrowsing to render accurately to agents, website assets (e.g. images, styles) must be publicly accessible.

For Public-Facing Websites

Public pages have all their assets publicly accessible, therefore no configuration is required for cobrowsing to work with public-facing websites.

For Websites Behind Authentication Walls

Applications behind login walls may not have all assets accessible.

These assets must be made publicly accessible in order to be rendered by the Talkative cobrowsing application.

Alternatively, if assets cannot be made publicly accessible, the Talkative Engage application must be whitelisted by your web servers.

Redacting Data from Agent

Whilst cobrowsing, there may be sensitive elements of the page that you wish to hide from the agent. By default, cobrowse will not transfer any text field with a type of password. 

If you wish to redact additional elements, you may add the follow attribute to the element:

data-tk-cobrowse-hidden="true"

When cobrowse detects this, it will replace the element with an empty black element, and not transmit any data stored within the element, including any values. This makes it ideal for sensitive data input like credit cards.

This attribute can be applied to any element, at any level, so you can redact entire blocks of HTML if necessary.

Technology Limitations

The Cobrowse Engine is built using the JavaScript language. At a very high level it will create a blueprint of the target website which, when sent to an agent console can be used to rebuild an exact likeness of the target website. The engine will then continue to recreate this blueprint and find any differences between this one and the last one sent and send them to the agent console for it to update itself. It will then track any actions which occur in the agent console, such as clicking and scrolling are transmitted back to the client side, where they are simulated. 

Unlike traditional desktop sharing tools, such as Zoom or RDP, Cobrowse utilises only JavaScript. These traditional tools require an installation onto the target machine to allow for direct access to the system, including creating virtual devices to track data exchange. These traditional approaches have the benefit of being multithreaded, which means that they can do multiple tasks at the same time.

WebRTC-based tools such as screensharing provide the best combination of i) download-free sharing, ii) fast performance, and iii) independence of any underlying website technology. 

JavaScript is a single threaded technology, which means tasks must be completed sequentially rather than at the same time. As a result of this, the speed at which the Cobrowse engine can run will be very much dependent on the speed of the device on which it is running.
The more data the engine needs to parse, the longer it will take for it to complete.
Websites with high numbers of elements, slow load times, and a large DOM do not always perform effectively with cobrowsing.

Disclaimer

If you are planning to use Talkative for cobrowsing, please speak to your Talkative representative in order to check your website behaviour. The majority of websites perform well with cobrowsing, however we highly recommend checking the performance of the tool before deploying to a production environment.