Turn web chat on

Somebody is on your website at eleven at night wondering whether you do balayage. They are not going to phone, and a contact form is a message they send into the dark.

Web chat is a bubble in the corner of your own website. A visitor taps it, types, and the conversation lands in your Inbox next to your texts and emails. They do not sign up, and they do not have to say who they are.

Turning it on

Settings → Web chat is one checkbox and a card of messages.

That's it for the salon side. Getting the bubble onto your actual website is one script tag, and if you already added the booking widget you've done it.

The three messages

They are not decoration. Each one covers a different moment, and the difference between them is whether you are open.

• Welcome message is the first thing in the panel, before the visitor has typed anything.
• Response-time message appears under their first message while you're open. This is where you set an expectation you can keep: "we usually reply within a few minutes" is a promise, and a slow Saturday will hold you to it.
• Away message appears under their first message outside your business hours — the same hours in Settings → Business hours that your booking page uses.

The header does some of this work for you without being asked: it reads Online now when you're open, and Away — back Tue 9

AM when you're not, from your real hours. A visitor at eleven at night knows before they type that nobody is sitting there.

What else the bubble does

Under Widget behavior:

• Ask visitors for their contact offers a small card — name, and a phone or email — once a visitor has spoken and nobody has answered yet. That is the moment it matters, because someone who leaves without a reply and without a number is gone.
• Allow photo attachments lets them send an inspiration photo instead of describing it.
• Live typing preview shows your team the visitor's draft as they type.
• Proactive prompt pops your welcome message up as a small bubble after a visitor has been on the page for a while. It appears once per visit and they can dismiss it.
• Auto-close idle chats tidies threads nobody has written in for a few days. It closes them, it doesn't delete them, and a visitor writing again reopens the same conversation.