Support Chat

What it does

Choose which chat your site offers, and organise the departments and staff who answer it. This is the page that makes Support Inbox receive anything at all.

Where to find it

Support -> Support Chat

Chat mode

Support chat decides which chat affordance your site offers:

Built-in chat - players chat in a window on your own site and their messages arrive in Support -> Support Inbox. People who have not signed in can chat too; they show up as Guest.
External link - the chat button opens the address in Live Chat URL instead. Nothing arrives in Support Inbox.
Off - no chat button is shown.

Live Chat URL is only editable while the mode is External link - in the other two modes nothing reads it, so it stays greyed out rather than inviting you to fix chat by pasting an address that does nothing.

Switching away from Built-in chat stops the feature, not just the button: no new chat can be opened and no chat window can reconnect. A conversation someone already has open can still exchange messages until they close the tab, though sending a file stops working right away. Nothing is deleted, and switching back picks everything up where it left off.

Guest name

Require guest name decides whether a visitor who is not signed in must give a name before their chat starts. It is off until you turn it on, and while it is off the name field is optional.

When it is on, the chat window shows the name field without “(optional)” and will not start the chat while it is empty or only spaces; the visitor sees a short message asking for their name. A chat already open when you turn it on carries on as it is. Signed-in players are never asked, because you already know who they are. The switch works with Built-in chat only.

Queue alerts and auto-close

Each limit is set to 0 to turn it off:

Alert after (minutes) - a queued chat waiting this long sounds the alert again and notifies your Telegram group.
Close empty chats after (hours) - a queued chat the player never wrote in is closed.
Close quiet chats after (hours) - a held chat that went quiet after your team’s last message, or a queued chat the assistant answered, is closed. Off until you set it.
Return to queue after (minutes) - a held chat where the player is still waiting goes back to the queue. A player who only said ok or thanks is not waiting. Off until you set it.
Close finished queued chats after (hours) - a queued chat whose last message came from your team or the assistant, or where the player only acknowledged it, is closed. 24 hours until you change it.
Keep chats the assistant answered out of the queue - a chat the assistant answered with a saved reply stays out of the queue until the player writes again.

A chat closed automatically shows why in the Closed tab. A player who writes again reopens it.

Departments

A department decides who sees which chats. New conversations land in the default department, and staff read and answer only the departments they are in. Every brand starts with one department, General.

To edit one, pick it from the list; to make a new one, fill the form with nothing selected. You choose its name, which staff are in it, and whether new chats land in it.

Rules worth knowing before you reorganise:

You cannot retire the department new chats land in. Make another one the default first.
Retiring a department moves all its chats to the default one, closed ones included, so the archive stays where the people who can read it are.
A seat in no department works the default one. That keeps somebody nobody has staffed yet from staring at a queue they cannot take from - but it also means clearing a person’s last department returns them to the default rather than shutting them out. To take somebody off support, remove their Support Inbox permission instead.
The roster only offers staff who hold the Support Inbox permission. Staffing somebody who cannot open a chat would park conversations on a seat that never sees them.

Who can do what

Departments say which chats a person works. What they may do with those chats is their role, set in Security & Access → Roles:

Support Inbox - work the queue: read and answer the departments they are in.
Support Inbox - read every department - read every conversation in the brand, internal notes included. They still answer only in their own departments.
Support Inbox - take over chats - pull a chat off the colleague currently answering it. Meant for freeing a conversation whose operator has gone offline.
Support Chat (this page) - change the chat mode and edit the departments. Editing a roster is editing who can read which conversations, so it is deliberately separate from working the queue.

An owner holds all four.