Chats section is where the communication between agents and customers happens. Here you can provide round the clock support and boost sales by converting people who are casually browsing your website into customers.
LiveChat provides quite a few tools that help with handling chats effectively. Below, you can find a rundown of the most important features and options available in the Chats section.
Chat list
The chat list is divided into three sections: my chats (all of your ongoing conversations), queued chats (customers who are waiting to start a chat) and supervised chats (conversations you are currently supervising).
My chats
A list of your ongoing chats. You can switch between them by clicking on the names of customers. We will let you know that you received a new message through in-browser notifications.
There are two types of chat statuses:
- active - either you or the customer has written something recently, these chats stay at the top of your list as they require your attention the most. If you don’t respond in 40 seconds a red rim will appear around the circle to remind you that you should respond immediately
- inactive - the customer hasn’t responded for a certain time (you can set the time after a chat turns inactive in Settings); it doesn’t necessarily mean that a customer has left, they might just need more time to respond; all inactive chats are greyed out and are placed at the bottom of the list
Queued chats
Visitors who are waiting for an available agent. If you have some free time on your hands just pick a customer from the list to start a conversation.
Supervised chats
Chats that are currently handled by other agents in your account, you can pick which chats you want to supervise in the Traffic section. To help your teammates without going over to their desk, you can send them a message in chat that is invisible to the customer.
Unassigned Chats
Unassigned chats are chat messages submitted while your team is offline. There are several integrations that allow customers to reach you during offline hours:
Another source of unassigned chats is when the chat widget availability is set to always. It’s an asynchronous form of communication that doesn’t require both parties to be online in a chat to send messages to each other (like Facebook Messenger).
Messages submitted using this mode show up as unassigned chats in the LiveChat Agent app Chats section:
Agents can answer them once they login into the app. Responses are sent to visitors’ email addresses as well as directly into the chat window on your website:
As you can see, LiveChat makes offline communication really seamless!
Chat list improvements
Sorting options
You can conveniently sort your queued and active chats by newest or oldest entries. These sorting options work on your chat list, and in the archives.
You can find the sorting options at the top of your chats list:
Reworked chat list timer
The new timer refreshes with each message sent from agents or clients, providing real-time insights into response times. This improvement aids you in monitoring how long clients are waiting for your attention and makes chats prioritization a breeze.
Agent response mark
The mark represents answered chats (the last response in a chat sent by an agent). This feature removes the hassle of entering every conversation one by one to determine who made the last comment. Now you can easily pick unattended clients without leaving your chats list. Navigate your conversations with newfound clarity thanks to this distinctive UI mark.
Chat feed
This is where the actual conversation takes place, aka the heart and soul of our app.
Chat history
In the history of your chat, you can see both the messages that were sent during the current conversation and messages that were sent before (providing the person you are talking to hasn’t cleared cookies since your last conversation).
Text area
To send a message, just type in your answer and press enter. We give your visitors a heads up that you are typing something so they know they need to wait for your reply. Once you press enter, your message will be sent to the visitor. And you will see it in the chat history.
Message sneak-peek
Message sneak-peek, lets you see what the visitor is typing before they send it over. This allows you to start thinking of the answer faster, making your responses quicker.
Canned responses
Canned responses are predefined messages that can store a large portion of text to be later recalled with shortcuts. To use canned responses in chats or tickets, simply type in # followed by the shortcut for the response you wish to use.
Learn how to create canned responses and more about their benefits in the canned responses tutorial.
Emojis
It is always a good idea to mirror the language of your customer. If they use formal language, make sure to be formal as well, but if they are informal and use emoticons, by all means, add emojis to your messages too. Click on the emoji icon to choose from over 1000 emojis in 8 categories.
Emoji reactions
You and your customers can react to each other messages with emojis. Each time you react, you pick a picture from a list.
It’s a simple, fast, and convenient way to let each other know how you feel. For example, you can use the hourglass emoji to let a customer know that you’re looking into their query. Or leave them a heart emoji as a reaction to their positive feedback, it will encourage them to write more in the future.
Give emoji reactions a go. You’ll be surprised how much impact a small picture can make!
