Push notifications for contacts

[ibrahim-almahfooz]

Hello,

We have a need to enable / integrate FCM notifications when agents answers users however we didn't see this feature in the platform. We are using the latest self-hosted release 4.15.1.

We read few 3-4 years articles that is not supported and we are wondering if it is still limited to agents only in the latest version or there is a way to configure it for Contacts / Users?

We though of developing a webhook server to be triggered upon message-update event however before we do so, we thought perhaps better to ask to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Appreciate your support and ideas

[CoderDeltaLAN]

Hello, yes your webhook-server approach is probably the right way to do it. I don’t think Chatwoot has a built-in setting to send FCM push notifications to contacts/users the same way it does for agents, so you would need to keep your own contact/device-token mapping and send the FCM push from your side. I’d start with message_created for new agent replies, filter only outgoing public messages for the right inbox/contact, and use message_updated only if your specific flow really depends on updates rather than newly created messages

[ibrahim-almahfooz]

Great. Then we are on the same page.

In case someone interested:
When the agent send a message to the contact, we configured a chatwoot webhook message_created (in the inbox settings), this event will be sent toward our backend and triggers it. The webhook event includes customer identifier (Phone number and fcm_token as a custom attribute) that we add to the contacts every time our customer open a chat conversation with us.

Finally, once the event triggers our Backend, we parse the json received, then use the fcm_token custom attribute to target the contacts and send them the notification.

If you are wondering about how we catch the FCM token; we generate it in our mobile app using firebase sdk and set the fcm_token custom attribute accordingly, then we consume it from our BE. Another approach is to directly use the FCM token if you are already storing it in your backend.

[CoderDeltaLAN]

Great, thanks for sharing the full setup. That makes sense, and it should help others trying to do the same with their own mobile app and backend.