Available on the Author and Studio plans.
A customer on your portal can start a live chat instead of filing a ticket. Somebody on your team picks it up and they talk. If nobody picks it up, it quietly becomes a normal ticket with everything they typed already in it.
That last part is the bit worth understanding, because it is what makes chat safe to offer when you are one person in one time zone.
Turning it on
Two things have to be true:
- Your plan includes it — Author or Studio.
- Somebody is available. In the agent top bar there is a Taking chats switch. Turn it on and you are on shift.
The chat button only appears to customers when at least one person is actually taking chats. A chat window nobody answers is worse than no chat window, so we do not show one.
Being on shift
While Taking chats is on, a waiting chat appears in your top bar and your bell rings. Click to join and you are in the conversation.
If you close your laptop, we notice. The switch stops counting after a couple of minutes of silence, so the chat button disappears for customers rather than promising someone who has gone home.
When nobody comes
After three minutes with nobody joining, the chat ends itself. The customer is told, in plain words, that you will email them instead.
Nothing is lost. Everything they typed is already a ticket, sitting in your inbox with its AI draft and a notification to your team — exactly as if they had used the ordinary form. They do not have to retype anything.
When somebody joins and then leaves
If an agent joins and then vanishes — closed the tab, went to lunch — the chat closes itself after ten minutes of silence from both sides. The customer's box goes back to the normal reply form, and the ticket stays open and assigned to whoever joined.
What you need running
Live chat needs a real-time connection, and timeouts need a background worker
and the scheduler. On a hosted plan those are our problem. If you are running
this yourself, DEPLOYMENT.md covers it — and the symptom of getting it wrong
is not an error, it is chat quietly not being live.