Live Chat
Live Chat is the inbox where your team reads and answers customer messages. Every conversation with your WhatsApp number is here, whether a chatbot is handling it or a person on your team.
It is also where most sales happen. A customer who writes to you is usually one question away from buying, and the speed of your answer decides whether they do.
The three sections
Live Chat sorts conversations by who is handling them.
| Section | What is in it | Who is answering |
|---|---|---|
| Active Chats | New conversations, and chats the chatbot is handling on its own | The chatbot |
| Requesting Chats | Chats where the customer asked for a person, or the chatbot could not help | The chatbot, until someone steps in |
| Intervened Chats | Chats a team member has taken over | Your team |
Requesting and Intervened chats are also shown in a bar across the top, so nobody misses a customer who is waiting.
How a chat moves
stateDiagram-v2
direction LR
[*] --> Active: Customer writes to you
Active --> Requesting: Asks for a person, or the bot cannot help
Requesting --> Intervened: A team member clicks Intervene
Intervened --> Active: The team member clicks Resolve
Active --> History: 24 hours with no message from the customer
History --> Active: The customer writes again
Intervene hands the chat to a person. The chatbot stops replying, so it does not talk over your team.
Resolve hands it back to the chatbot.
After 24 hours with no message from the customer, the chat moves to the History page. See Chat history.
Answer a customer
- Open Requesting Chats and click the chat.
- Click Intervene at the bottom of the chat.
- Reply. You can type, send an image, video or file, or pick a canned message by typing
/. See Canned messages. - When the customer has what they need, click Resolve at the top of the chat.
While the chat is open, the customer's profile sits beside it: their tags, attributes, the campaigns they received, and everything that has happened in the chat. See Chat profile.
What you can send
Inside the 24-hour window, which opens every time the customer writes, you can send anything: text, images, video, files, canned messages. Once 24 hours pass with nothing from the customer, you can only send a template. See How it works.
Pages in this section
Everything you know about the customer, beside the chat. See Chat profile.
Chats that went quiet, and how to message those customers again. See Chat history.
Decide which agent sees which chats, and hand a chat to someone else. See Assign and transfer chats.
Saved replies for the questions you answer every day. See Canned messages.
Resolve forgotten chats automatically. See Live Chat settings.
Sounds and push notifications for new messages. See Notification preferences.
Running Live Chat well
Answer Requesting Chats first. Those customers asked for a person and are waiting. Every minute they wait, some of them give up and buy somewhere else. Keep the top bar empty.
Always click Resolve when you are done. An intervened chat stays with the person who took it. If they forget to resolve it, the customer's next message may go unseen by everyone else, and the chatbot stays switched off for that customer. Turning on auto-resolve catches the ones people forget. See Live Chat settings.
Reply inside the window. The 24-hour window is your chance to talk freely. A customer who asked about sizes at 9 pm and got an answer at 10 am the next day can still be answered normally. One who waited 26 hours needs a template.
Tag while you talk. When a customer asks about something you do not have, tag them, for example wants_restock_alert. When it comes back, you can broadcast to exactly those people. See Tags and attributes.
Updated about 1 month ago