Talking to customers in Chat

Where it lives

Open your shop and look for Chat in the shop's menu. It has up to four sections:

• Dashboard - the health check: how many sessions are active, how many are waiting for someone, how many messages are unread, and how many agents you have.
• Agents - who on your staff is allowed to answer chats. New agents are created here; each one can be given specialities such as sales, billing, support or complaints.
• Conversations - the full archive, every chat that ever happened in this shop, with its status and its history.
• Inbox - the working screen. You only see this entry if you are set up as a chat agent yourself.

Taking a chat

The Inbox splits conversations into three lists: My Chats (assigned to you), Team Chats (assigned to colleagues - you can still read them, and take over if needed) and Waiting (nobody has picked them up yet). A waiting chat shows an Assign to me button; click it and the conversation is yours. You can also filter the lists by agent, or switch to the Highlighted, Spam and Trash views.

Once a chat is yours, it works like any messenger: type and Send, add an emoji, attach an image or a file (up to five at a time). The customer sees when you are typing, and you see when they are.

Two things make it more than a messenger:

• Translation. If the customer writes in another language, use Translate To.. and read the conversation in yours - and your replies can be translated back. Language stops being a reason to pass a chat around.
• The customer at your side. A side panel shows who you are talking to. If they are a known customer you get their profile, order history, invoices, total spend and what is sitting in their basket right now - with a link straight to their full customer page. If they are a guest, you can sync by email to connect the chat to their customer record. There is also an AI Summary of the conversation so far, with its overall sentiment and key points - handy when you take over a chat mid-stream.

Priorities, highlights and housekeeping

• Mark a session urgent when it needs eyes now; everything else stays normal.
• Highlight a conversation you want to find again easily - it appears in the Highlighted list.
• Report spam moves junk out of the way (and Not spam brings back a mistake). Move to trash does the same for dead conversations; both can be restored.
• If a colleague is handling a chat and goes to lunch, Take Over reassigns it to you on the spot.

When you need more than chat

From inside a conversation you can Share to Slack - the whole session, or just one message - so a colleague who lives in Slack sees it immediately. You can also Create a Jira ticket straight from the chat when the customer has found a real problem that developers need to look at; the ticket carries the context so you don't retype the story. Both need to be configured once in the chat settings before the buttons do anything.

Ending well

End chat closes the session; the customer is told, and the whole conversation is preserved in Conversations forever. If they come back with "one more thing", Reopen picks up exactly where you left off - the history stays in one thread instead of scattering across new sessions.

The Conversations archive shows every chat with its status - active, waiting, resolved, transferred, closed - and an Export button that downloads filtered sets of past conversations as a spreadsheet, which is useful for reviews of how the team is answering.

Out of hours

The website widget knows your working hours. Outside them it tells the customer the team is offline, shows when you are back, and offers a short form - name, email, message. Those offline messages arrive in chat like any other conversation, waiting for the first agent of the morning.