Live support and voice calls

1. 01

   Something triggers it

   The visitor asks for a person, presses Talk to a human, gives a thumbs-down, or the assistant cannot answer several questions in a row.

2. 02

   The chat is routed

   Routing rules pick a team, then the chat rings for one online agent with a free slot until they accept it. If they decline or do not answer in time, it rings for the next agent, or waits in the queue for someone to claim it.

3. 03

   An agent replies in the Inbox

   The visitor sees the agent's name and replies in the same chat window. The agent can share files, add internal notes and call the visitor.

4. 04

   The chat closes

   The agent closes it or returns it to the assistant. The visitor can be emailed the transcript and asked for a rating.

When nobody is available, outside business hours or with no agent online, the visitor can leave a message with their email; agents reply by email from the Inbox.

Tip: Turn on live support in the bot's Handoff tab first. Only workspace owners and admins can change these settings.

Asking for a person starts a handoff; keywords and unanswered questions only offer one, and the visitor chooses. The assistant offers at most once every 10 minutes per chat. On the Guardrails tab you can also make refusals offer a person instead.

With least busy or round robin, a new chat is offered to the chosen agent: it rings in their dashboard (sound, a flashing card and the tab title) until they press Accept. The visitor keeps seeing their place in the queue and sees the agent join only after Accept. Decline passes it to the next available agent. If nobody answers within the ring time (Handoff tab, 15 to 300 seconds, default 60), it moves on to the next agent, and when nobody is left it waits in the queue for anyone to claim. A chat that rings for an agent counts toward their chat limit, and going Away or Offline passes it on right away.

Teams (Settings, Agent teams) group agents, for example Hindi support or Billing. Each team has a name, members (people with the agent role or capability), its own routing mode, a maximum number of chats per agent (1 to 50), optional business hours and its own waiting messages.

Routing rules on the Handoff tab decide which team gets a chat. Rules are checked in order and the first one whose conditions all match wins. A rule can match on:

• Visitor language (hi also matches romanised Hindi).
• Keywords in the conversation.
• Signed-in user attributes, for example plan=enterprise; anonymous visitors never match these.
• What the visitor wanted: a question, a follow-up, asked for a person and similar.
• Topics: which knowledge sources the assistant cited.

If no rule matches, the default team gets the chat; with no default team, any agent can take it. The fallback team takes chats the chosen team cannot serve, and chats that wait longer than the overflow time (default 3 minutes).

• Only offer live chat during business hours: set a time zone (for example Asia/Kolkata), hours per day and holidays (YYYY-MM-DD, one per line). Off means live chat is offered at any time when an agent is online.
• Offer the offline form after (minutes): how long a visitor waits in the queue before they are offered the form (default 5).
• When nobody is available: let visitors leave a message (default) or only say nobody is available.
• Require the visitor's email: on by default, so you can reply.
• Email offline messages to all agents, or to online agents (everyone when nobody is online).
• Email agents when a chat is waiting: off by default. Emails agents (all, or online ones) when a live chat is still unclaimed after 1 to 60 minutes (default 2), at most once per conversation.
• Ask for a rating when a chat closes: on by default.

Every visitor-facing text can be changed: the button label, the offer, the waiting message and queue position, the typical response time, the nobody-available text and the rating question. {response_time}, {position} and {agent_name} are filled in for you.

• Queues: Waiting (longest wait first), Mine, Open and Closed, with a search box (name, email, user id or words from the chat) and a team filter.
• Each chat shows who the visitor is (their name or email, otherwise a short id such as Visitor 7F3A), their language and page, and Returning when they chatted before. Unread chats are bold with a dot.
• The clock shows how long the visitor has waited for a reply. It turns amber after 2 minutes and red after 5 for live chats, and after 4 and 24 hours for offline messages.
• The team strip shows each team's waiting, live and offline chats and who is online; open Team details for the full board.
• A chat offered to you appears on top of the queue as a flashing card with a countdown: Accept opens it, Decline passes it on. While a chat rings for you, or a waiting chat you can take rings for nobody and you are Online, the dashboard plays a sound every few seconds (on any page), the tab title flashes and a desktop notification shows once per new chat (if turned on). If the browser blocks sound, click “Click to enable sound” in the Inbox header; the visual alert works regardless.
• Claim a waiting chat, or just reply: replying to a queued chat claims it. Offline messages are answered with Reply by email.
• Route moves a chat to another team or transfers it to an agent. Return to bot or Close (optionally emailing the transcript); after closing, the next waiting chat opens.
• The right column shows the visitor's details with copy buttons, what the bot remembers about a signed-in user (owners, admins and members), the signed context your site sent, and their previous conversations.
• Keyboard shortcuts: J and K move between chats, R replies, E closes, / opens canned responses, A accepts and D declines the chat offered to you, Esc leaves the reply box and ? lists them all.
• Internal notes are seen only by agents.
• Canned responses (set up on the Handoff tab) insert common replies.
• You see when the visitor is typing, and they see when you are.
• Set your status to Online, Away or Offline in the top bar. After 10 idle minutes you count as away.
• The bell counts waiting and unread chats. Turn on desktop notifications and sound from it; the choice is kept per browser.

An agent (without supervisor access) sees only their own chats: waiting chats of their teams or with no team that ring for nobody or for them, chats assigned to them, and closed chats they handled (they had it when it closed, closed it, or wrote in it). A chat that rings for another agent, or that was transferred to someone else, disappears from their lists. Owners and admins see everything. Agents are notified in the dashboard; turn on “Email agents when a chat is waiting” on the Handoff tab to also email them when a chat waits unclaimed.

Turn on attachments on the Handoff tab to let agents and visitors exchange files during a live chat. Off by default.

• Types: images (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC), PDF, Word (DOCX), Excel (XLSX), text (TXT, CSV).
• Maximum size 1 to 25 MB (default 10), up to 10 files per message (default 5).
• Files can also be attached to the offline form; replies to offline messages go by email.
• The assistant never reads the files; only people in the chat see them.

The agent who has a live chat can call the visitor in the browser, with no phone number. Audio only, never recorded or transcribed; the call leaves one line in the transcript.

Tip: Voice calls are available on plans that include voice calls. If yours does not, the switch in the Handoff tab is off and cannot be turned on; your platform administrator can add voice calls to your plan.

1. 01

   Turn it on

   Handoff tab, Voice calls. Choose how long to ring (15 to 60 seconds, default 30) and the maximum call length (1 to 120 minutes, default 30).

2. 02

   Claim the chat

   Only the assigned agent can call, while the visitor is still on the page.

3. 03

   The visitor accepts

   The widget shows the incoming call. The microphone is used only after they accept.

Watch out: Your site must be served over HTTPS and must not block the microphone. If it sends a Permissions-Policy header, allow microphone=(self). If the microphone is blocked, the widget declines calls automatically.

Agents get a private AI helper in the Inbox, in the AI assist panel above the visitor details. It uses the bot's knowledge, guardrails and the bot's own AI key and model, so each request counts as usage on your provider account. Nothing it writes reaches the visitor until the agent sends it.

1. 01

   Suggest reply

   Press Suggest reply (or Ctrl+J, Cmd+J on a Mac). A draft in the visitor's language streams into the panel with the sources it used. Use draft puts it in the reply box, where you can edit it before sending; Regenerate asks again; Discard drops it. The draft answers everything the visitor sent since your last reply; to answer one particular message, even an older one, hover it and choose Suggest reply to this.

2. 02

   Ask AI

   Type a question such as "What is the refund window for signed copies?". The answer is for you only, with numbered links to the sources. Insert into reply adds it to your reply without the numbers.

3. 03

   Translate

   Hover a visitor message and choose Translate to read it in English. Translate to visitor's language on the reply box translates your draft and replaces the text only after you confirm.

• Replies sent from a draft are marked AI-assisted (and edited, when you changed the text) in the bot's Conversations view.
• Auto-draft (Handoff tab) requests a draft when an agent opens a live chat whose last message is the visitor's, once per new visitor message.
• Owners and admins who supervise without the agent capability can ask and translate, but not draft.

Tip: AI assist is available on plans that include it. It is on by default in the Handoff tab; if your plan does not include it, the tab says so and the panel does not appear. Your platform administrator can add it to your plan.