Answer visitors

Every message visitors send lands in Conversations. This page covers accepting, replying, transferring and ending chats, and the visitor details on the right.

Your status

You're Online, Busy or Offline. Only online agents are assigned new chats. New members start online (the workspace can change that; see Team and routing).

Three tabs

Tab	What's in it
Waiting	Visitors who wrote and haven't been picked up yet, longest wait first. Customer groups served first are at the top, marked Priority.
Active	Conversations someone on your team is handling.
Closed	Finished conversations. Filter by site, agent, rating, customer tag, inquiry type and date.

Accept and reply

• When a site assigns chats by Take turns or Least busy agent, new chats go to online agents automatically. With Agents pick them up, open the chat in Waiting and click Accept.
• Each agent has a limit of Chats at the same time. At the limit, clicking Accept or Reopen tells you to end a chat first; owners and admins can raise the limit in Team.
• Send text, emoji, images and files. Type / and a shortcut to insert a quick reply.
• Switch the composer to Internal note to write something only your team sees. Visitors never see notes.
• You can see when the visitor is typing.

Transfer

Click Transfer and pick a teammate who handles this site, or an agent group. You can leave them a note the visitor doesn't see. The workspace can make that note required.

End and reopen

• Click End conversation. Quiet chats also end on their own (30 minutes by default; 10 minutes to 24 hours under Sites → Hours & waiting).
• If the site lets visitors end chats themselves, they can do it from the widget.
• After a chat ends, the visitor can rate it. A bad rating puts the chat on the follow-up list and reminds its owner when due.
• Open a chat in Closed and click Reopen to continue it. If that visitor already has another conversation under way, you're told so and can jump straight to it.

Visitor details on the right

The right side is the customer card, top to bottom:

• Summary and customer: new or returning, which visit, the page they're on, where they came from, local time. In an ended chat, Start a chat if they're on your site, or Send an email from your own mailbox if they left one.
• Follow-up: lead status, owner, next follow-up and amount. See Customers and reports. A customer has one follow-up, the same in all their chats.
• Customer note: what to know about this customer, several lines, seen only by your team and on all their chats. The note button at the top of the chat edits it too.
• Contact details: name, email, phone, location, device and more.
• Customer group and customer tags: who the customer is, such as VIP or wholesale.
• Inquiry type: what this one chat is about, such as "refund" or "pre-sales", to filter and count later.
• Earlier conversations with this customer.
• If your site uses visitor identity, signed-in customers show as Verified, with any member details you pass.

When a chat ends and the customer left an email or phone but has no next follow-up, the chat asks whether to set one: Tomorrow, In 3 days or Next week. Follow-up, return and bad-rating reminders open the chat with the customer card showing.

Live visitors and starting a chat yourself

Live visitors in the side menu lists who is on your sites right now, refreshed every 10 seconds; visitors drop off when they leave. Switch to Last 24 hours, Last 3 days or Last 7 days at the top to see who came in that time (those who left show when they were here, and View conversation if they chatted):

• The page they are reading, how long they have been on it, and how many pages they have read; click the page count to see every page they opened (title, link, when, and for how long).
• How they came: search (with the search terms when known), an ad, social media, another site, or directly.
• First visit or how many, and their city.
• Whether someone is chatting with them: waiting, with you, or with a teammate; click to open the conversation.

Agents see visitors on their own sites only, and the list never shows a visitor's email, phone or IP. Tick Not chatting only to find visitors nobody is talking to yet.

When you see someone browsing, click Start chat to say hello first (also from the visitor's profile or the follow-up list). Your message appears next to their chat button without opening the window. To avoid bothering visitors, each agent can start a limited number of chats per hour (30 by default; change it under Settings → Reception).

Quick replies

Quick replies holds Team quick replies (everyone uses them; owners and admins maintain them) and your own. Group them and attach link cards. {visitor} becomes the visitor's name; when they haven't given one, it becomes the word you set under Settings → Reception, or is left out.

Message translation

On Pro and Business, turn on message translation under Settings → Translation: visitors' messages are translated into your language, and your replies into theirs. Only the workspace owner can turn it on. It is off by default, because the text you translate is sent to a translation provider.

Replying in the visitor's language:

1. At the top of the conversation, Reply language is Auto at first: the visitor's browser language, or when that isn't known, the language detected in their messages. A phrase in another language or an emoji doesn't change it. You can pick a language instead; it holds for this conversation, and colleagues in it see the same.
2. Write your reply in your own language and click the translate button below the text box.
3. What the visitor gets appears above the box, with your original still in it. If the language is wrong, pick another one right there and it's translated again.
4. Click Send translation and the visitor gets only the translation. If you change the original afterwards, the translation says it needs updating, and sending translates it again first so you can check it.
5. To send your original instead, close the translation with × and send.

Messages of only emoji, digits or punctuation aren't translated and don't use the allowance.

The allowance is counted in characters each month; see this month's usage on the Billing page:

Plan	Characters a month
Free, Starter	Not included
Pro	100,000
Business	500,000 (10,000 during the free trial)

• Visitors' messages and your replies both count by the length of the original text.
• A visitor message translated once isn't counted again when you reopen it; each reply translation counts every time.
• With Auto-translate new visitor messages on in a conversation, every new message uses the allowance.
• The allowance is shared by the whole workspace, resets on the 1st of each month (UTC) and doesn't carry over. The owner gets an email at 80% and 100%.
• Once it's used up, translation pauses until next month, or you can move to a plan with a larger allowance. Extra characters can't be bought separately for now.

Notifications

• Push: account menu → Push notifications on this device. Works with the console closed. By default the lock screen shows only the site and page, not what the visitor wrote.
• Sounds, desktop notifications, emails and the weekly summary: Settings → Notifications, set by each person.