Live chat
Turning on human handoff, what visitors see at each stage, and the seven availability states that decide what happens when they ask.
Turning it on
Check your plan includes it
Live chat is available from Starter upwards. On Free the controls are visible but locked.
Add at least one operator
A chatbot with live chat enabled and no operators shows the offline form to everyone who asks for a human. See Operators and seats.
Set business hours
Outside them the widget offers the offline form and tells the visitor when you are back.
Test the handoff
Ask your own chatbot for a human and confirm the request arrives in the Support inbox.
The seven availability states
When a visitor asks for a human, one deterministic check decides what happens. The first matching state wins, so a chatbot outside business hours never shows a queue even if operators happen to be online.
| # | State | What the visitor gets |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feature disabled | Offline form immediately. Either your plan excludes live chat or the toggle is off. |
| 2 | No operators | Offline form immediately. The workspace has no operators at all. |
| 3 | Out of hours | Offline form, plus when you are next open. |
| 4 | All offline | Offline form, plus "the team is offline". |
| 5 | Queue full | Offline form, plus "we are very busy". |
| 6 | All busy | The queue, with progressive waiting messages and a timeout to the offline form. |
| 7 | Available | Routed to an operator. |
The Support inbox shows the current state as a status pill, so you can always see which of the seven a visitor would hit right now.
Business hours
Business hours are per weekday with an explicit timezone, and a day can be marked closed. Departments can override the chatbot's hours with their own, so a sales team on IST hours and a support team on UK hours never contradict each other.
{
"timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
"mon": { "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00" },
"tue": { "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00" },
"wed": { "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00" },
"thu": { "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00" },
"fri": { "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00" },
"sat": { "start": "10:00", "end": "14:00" },
"sun": null
}The queue
When every online operator is at capacity, waiting visitors queue. Two settings bound it: the queue timeout (default 20 seconds) after which the visitor is offered the offline form, and the maximum queue size (default 10) past which new requests get the offline form directly.
Showing queue position is off by default. It reassures visitors when your queue is short and does the opposite when it is long. Turn it on only if you know which situation you are in.
What operators can do
- Accept a queued conversation and start chatting.
- Take over a conversation the chatbot is currently handling.
- Connect. Invite a visitor in an AI conversation to talk to a human; they choose.
- Transfer an active conversation to another operator or department.
- Close. Hand the visitor back to the chatbot.
- Resolve. End the conversation and mark it done.
- Send files, if file sharing is enabled for that chatbot.
- Insert a canned response with a slash shortcut.
- Read and edit the conversation's qualification scores.
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