This article contains the following sections:
Responding to or initiating a chat with a visitor
This section describes basics of how to chat with visitors to your website. To learn about chatting with agents, see the next section.
Answering a chat
To start chatting with a visitor, click Serve 1 request in the bottom left corner.
You can add images, emoji, and send customers requests to rate your chat, using the buttons in the bottom left of the chat window. Emoji and images are enabled by default and cannot be turned off. Chat ratings must be turned on (see Measuring visitor satisfaction with chat rating)
Starting a proactive chat with a visitor
You can proactively start chatting with visitors by selecting them from the Visitor List. From the Visitor List, you can see details about all the visitors currently on your website, including their location, the page they're on, and their chat status. For example, you might want to reach out to visitors who have items their shopping cart but are taking too long to complete their purchases.
For more information, see Browsing your site's visitors.
To start a proactive chat
- From the dashboard, click Visitors.
- Click a visitor's name in List mode.
- Type your message in the chat window and press Enter to send.
Viewing visitor details
- Click the History icon in the chat window to review the visitor's chat history. Click on a conversation to view its transcript.
- Click the Info icon in the chat window to view or edit the visitor's contact info. This is the information that will be used for the ticket requester if you create a ticket from the chat.
Ending a chat
When you're finished with a chat, click End Chat to end the conversation.
Transferring a chat
Transfer chats to other agents or to departments. Keep in mind the following when transferring chats to departments:
- You can transfer the chat to another department or to a department you're in as long as you're not the only agent online in that department. If you transfer it to a department you're in, you won't get the same chat again.
- Transferred chats are added to the bottom of the chat routing queue.
To transfer a chat to an agent or department
- Select Invite Agent/Transfer to Agent or Transfer to Department from the chat window's Actions drop-down menu.
- Select a department from the drop-down menu or enter an agent.
- Click Transfer.
Chatting with other agents
You can chat with other agents either by adding them to an existing conversation with a visitor or in a separate chat without any visitors.
To add another agent to a chat with a visitor
- Select Invite Agent/Transfer To Agent from the chat window's Actions drop-down menu.
- Enter the agent in the Agent Email field.
- To leave the chat and have the other agent take over, click Transfer and Leave. To add the agent and stay in the conversation, click Invite.
To chat with another agent
- To start a conversation with just you and another agent (no visitors), click Team on the from the left bar, then click the agent's name to open a chat.
9 Comments
Hi Mark,
You can look at using email piping to send the transcripts to another system: https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/212679667-Automatically-send-chat-transcripts-with-email-piping
-Ramin
Any ideas why the transfer options are grayed out for me?
I have other multiple agents signed in as well. We do not have Departments set up, but it sounds like that shouldn't matter.
Thanks!
Hi Eric,
That's a bit odd, so I'm going to pull this into a ticket in order to troubleshoot this in more detail. I'll be reaching out soon on that ticket!
Hi there
I couldn't find the answer anywhere - if we have the widget enabled on a certain page and a customer uses it to initiate a chat with us which we then serve, what happens if that customer navigates away from that page in the middle of the chat to a page with no widget activated - do they lose the chat?
Thanks!
Fiona
@Fiona,
We don't use Standalone Chat, but we have found that for Integrated Chat with Zendesk support, if the customer navigates away, even to a page without the widget, they will lose the chat and have to restart it. Sometimes the system connects them up and it finds the original chat, sometimes not.
We have a shortcut our Agents use to ask the customer to either 1. open a new browser to follow our directions on navigation or 2. press the popout button (should be on the top right of their chat box) so we don't lose them!
Thanks, Heather.
Is that expected behaviour, do you know?
If a customer is using the widget (to chat or send in a contact request), will they lose their progress so far if they navigate to another page? Can we solve that by having the widget embedded on every page?
I was on a chat with a company that uses Zendesk and the chat followed me as I navigated through the website, so I assumed that would be the case for ours too, but we haven't launched our site yet so I haven't been able to test.
Also, if the chat is cut-off, does it still become a ticket (if I have that set up) or is it lost in the system?
Thank you!
Fiona
Hi Fiona,
It's expected behavior from a Zendesk perspective, but maybe not from our perspective :D
The customer using the widget doesn't seem to lose their progress so far and depending how long it's been, the Agent is given an option to pick up with that person where they left off most of the time. I can't figure out the scenario where this doesn't happen, so we merge tickets after it's created (automatically done for you, you would set whether the ticket is private or public, public means the customer gets a copy of the transcript).
Making sure you embed the widget code in the header or footer in accordance with Zendesk's instructions will definitely be helpful because obviously if they land on a page without the widget.......
Yes all chats become tickets so that's good! And you can configure whether the person is required to enter their name, email, etc.
Hopefully this helps!
Thanks, Heather!
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