Answering a chat

A chat from your website arrives in the Inbox. Not a separate app, not a different tab — the same list as your texts and emails, marked with a globe.

Everything you already know about the Inbox works here: Reply and Note, Send & close, snoozing, assigning. What's different is the person. They haven't given you a name, a number or an appointment history, and the two panels either side of the thread are about closing that gap.

Who is this

The header says the visitor's name and, quietly beside it, website visitor. The name — Cobalt Fern, Amber Lynx — is generated, and it exists so a real human can say it out loud across a desk.

The right-hand rail is their whole record: when they were last on your site — or that they're on it right now — anything they've typed as contact details, and nothing else. That's the honest state of things: they walked up to the counter and asked a question.

Replying

That last point is the limitation worth holding in your head: a chat reply reaches a browser, not a person. Someone who closes the tab for good never sees it. Which is the whole argument for the next bit.

Are they still there?

Look for the green dot. A visitor with your site open in front of them gets one on their row in the list, and their card reads on your site now instead of seen 20m.

It answers the only question that changes what you do next. A dot means a reply you send in the next minute lands on a screen someone is looking at — worth stopping for. No dot means you're leaving a note for whenever they come back, which is fine, and is also the moment to get a phone number instead.

Three things it is honest about:

• It only ever covers people who have already written to you. Someone reading your prices right now, who has never said a word, is not a visitor yet and gets no dot. Nothing here counts browsers.
• A tab they've buried behind twenty others doesn't count. Being on your site means your page is the one in front of them.
• It goes out by itself, about a minute and a half after they leave. You never clear it, and it can't get stuck on — if the dot is there, they are.

Turning a visitor into a client

If they typed a phone number or an email — into the chat, or into the small card the widget offers them — it's on their card in the rail, marked as something they said rather than something you verified.

Two buttons:

• Link client attaches this chat to a client you already have. Find them in the picker and press it.
• Create client & link makes a new client from what they shared and links it in one step. It only appears when there's enough to work with — a name plus a usable phone or email.

Either way the chat merges into that client's history, so the next person who opens their record sees this conversation alongside their texts and their appointments. Nothing is merged automatically and nothing is guessed from a phone number, because getting that wrong means showing one client another client's conversation.

When it isn't a real enquiry

Web chat is a box on the open internet, so occasionally it collects rubbish.

Block in the toolbar stops that visitor sending anything else. They can still read the thread — nothing vanishes from under them — but messages, contact details and attachments are all refused, and Unblock puts it back.

For a single message rather than a person, hover the bubble and press the bin. It disappears from the visitor's chat as well as yours, leaving Message deleted by staff in its place so the thread still reads in order. Attachments go with it, and it can't be undone.