Escalation and replying
Every bot eventually meets a question it should not answer. What it does then is more important to your customers than anything it gets right on its own.
Two ways a chat reaches a person
- The visitor asks. “Can I talk to someone?” and its hundred variations are recognised directly.
- The bot decides. When the knowledge base does not cover the question, or the visitor is clearly unhappy, it offers a person rather than guessing.
Both are what the escalation prompt on the Behaviour page tunes. It is worth writing something specific there: “before handing over, find out which product they are asking about” produces a queue where every item is actionable, instead of a queue of “customer needs help”.
Live and Tickets
Both live under Chats, as tabs beside All chats. They are separate because they are two different jobs, not two urgencies of one.
- Live is somebody waiting right now, in a chat window that is still open. Two things have to be true for anyone to arrive: the bot must be set to offer a person — that is “Offer a live person first, then open a ticket” under Behaviour → Escalation — and somebody must be marked available, which is the switch on this tab. Turn availability off and the bot stops offering a person rather than promising one who is not there. If the setting is wrong the tab says so and names it.
- Tickets is everything else: the visitor has gone, and a reply reaches them by email.
Chats that become tickets on their own
A conversation that collected an email or a phone number and then ended lands in the inbox as a ticket, whether or not anybody asked for a person. This is the part most people do not expect and it is the most useful behaviour in the product.
The reasoning: a chat you can reply to is worth somebody’s attention. A visitor who left an address and drifted away is a lead, and a transcript with nobody able to act on it is a lead you paid for and threw away. It arrives marked as a closed chat rather than resolved — nothing was answered, so calling it resolved would be a lie about what happened.
Chats that ended with no way to reply stay under All chats. They are history, not a queue: nothing can be done about them, and putting them in a queue means the queue stops being read. That tab also carries a summary of what visitors kept asking about over the last week, which is the question a list of individual chats cannot answer.
Replying
A reply goes out by email and threads properly, so the visitor’s response comes back into the same ticket rather than into somebody’s personal mailbox. They can also return to the original chat through a link, and everything said stays in one transcript.
This needs working outbound mail. Until email is configured, a reply has nowhere to go — which is a much quieter failure than it sounds, so check it before you rely on it.
Resolving
Mark a ticket resolved when it is done. It leaves Open and stays searchable in All, and can be reopened if the visitor writes back.
The right-hand panel shows every detail collected: name, email, phone, location, device, which page they were on. Fields nobody has filled are shown empty rather than hidden, because an empty Phone row tells you your bot is not collecting phone numbers, which is a setting you may want to change.