Away email, follow-ups and transcripts

Everything on this page is set per website chat inbox under Settings › Inboxes › the inbox, and needs no change to your site.

Asking where to reply

While nobody is online, or the inbox is outside its business hours, the chat asks the visitor for an email address: optional (the default) shows a card after their first message, required asks before it, off never asks. The address is kept on the contact as information only; like the pre-chat email, it never identifies the visitor or links two contacts together. A signed-in visitor who leaves an address before writing gets their contact at this point.

Follow-up emails

A reply from your team that the visitor has not seen, with their chat closed, is emailed to that address after 10 minutes (1 to 120, or switched off). Replies written in the meantime go in the same email, a reply the visitor saw is never emailed, and each reply is emailed at most once. Only people's replies are emailed, not bots'. The email is in the visitor's language and links back to the page they chatted from, where the chat continues the same conversation for 14 days, even in another browser. The link works for anonymous visitors only; a signed-in customer simply signs in on your site. The part of the link that carries the chat never reaches your server or its logs, and the chat removes it from the address bar.

Where the email comes from:

• One of your email inboxes (recommended): it is sent from your own address, and the visitor's reply to it threads back into the same chat, where it appears in the widget and your agent answers there. Only mail from the address the follow-up went to is threaded this way; anything else stays in the email inbox.
• Kommio's system mail (the default): sent with the inbox's name as the sender name. Replies to it are not received, so the email says so and points to the link instead.

Transcripts

Visitors can ask for a transcript at the end of a chat ("Email me the transcript", on by default), and an inbox can send one whenever a conversation is resolved (off by default). A transcript holds the conversation's replies only, never private notes or activity lines, in the visitor's language. It is available once someone from your team has replied, at most three times a day per conversation and two minutes apart. Every email leaves a line in the conversation ("Reply emailed to …", "Transcript emailed to …").

The chat header, reply time and Seen

• Who is there: up to three members of the inbox who are online or busy with the app open, shown as initials (their first names for screen readers only). Nothing more about your team reaches the page, and an inbox that answers as the team shows none. It can be switched off.
• Expected reply time: automatic by default, the median first reply of the inbox's conversations of the last seven days counted in business time, shown once at least five replies are known. It can also be a preset (a few minutes, about an hour, a few hours, within a day), your own words, or off.
• Seen: once an agent has read a visitor's message, the visitor's latest message says "Seen 14:03"; this can be turned off for visitors. Agents always see "Seen" under their latest reply once the visitor has had it on screen.

Quick replies

Agents can add up to 10 tappable answers, of up to 40 characters each, to a reply in a website chat from the composer's Quick replies. The chat shows them as buttons under the message, the same buttons a chatbot flow's choices use; tapping one sends its text, and the buttons go once the visitor writes anything. On channels without buttons they are added to the text as a numbered list.