Chat Management: Settings
Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 4 MINSet and communicate reliable support expectations with your customers. With Kustomer chat, you have control over each brand's chat settings and functionality. Choose when, where, and how your teams connect with customers over chat.
In this article, we'll explore the main chat settings available in chat and how you can do the following for each brand:
- Turn on chat settings
- Tailor the chat support experience
- Set chat widget business hours availability
- Add a fallback email for missed chats
- Assign a conversational assistant
Who can access this feature? | |
User types | Admins can access chat settings. |
In this article
- Access chat settings
- Turn on chat for a brand
- Typing indicators
- Synchronous chat settings
- Fallback email
- Business hours availability
- Default assistant
Access chat settings
To access the chat settings, go to Apps> Chat and then go to the Settings tab.
Turn on chat for a brand
Chat is turned on by default when you create a brand. This means the chat widget will be available for that brand's website.
You can turn chat off for a specific brand by navigating to the Chat page, selecting the brand from the drop-down menu, and turning the Chat toggle off.
Typing indicators
Typing indicators signal when the person on the other side of the chat is typing a response.
With chat, you can provide typing indicators for agents, customers, or both.
Note: Typing indicators are also available in the Kustomer Chat Mobile SDKs for iOS and Android.
Synchronous chat settings
You can configure real-time chat settings to end customer chats to experience more synchronous chats with your customers.
Select the Allow chats to be ended option to allow customers to select End Chat in the chat widget to end a chat immediately for the customer and the agent. When a customer ends the chat, the widget notifies the agent that the conversation has ended.
Kustomer automatically completes and logs conversations ended by the customer without agent action.
When a conversation is marked done in Kustomer, the Ended value for the conversation is set to True and customers must start a new conversation to request additional support. For a customer to be able to reopen their chat conversation, the value for Ended must be updated from True to False in Kustomer.
Select Restrict to single open chat to ensure customers have only one chat open at a time. This means that a customer won’t be able to open a second chat if they already have a chat open with an agent.
Note: Select Allow chats to be ended to make this option available.
By default, customers can see their previous chat history if Kustomer can identify them through their email address or other criteria you pass through the API.
Select Hide chat history to hide the previous chat history from view for the customer. This option removes the current chat from the widget once the agent or customer closes the chat,
Note: Select both Allow chats to be ended and Restrict to single open chat to make this option available.
Hide attachments button
Select the Hide attachments button to prevent customers from sending attachments in a chat message.
Display "Bot" as a note underneath automated messages
This option displays the word Bot underneath messages sent by the assistant to disclose to your customers that they are not speaking to a person.
For additional tips on how to disclose that your conversational assistant is not a person, see our best practices article.
Fallback email
Automatically deliver agent messages over email when a customer is inactive on chat.
Select a fallback email address to send the agent message from when a customer leaves chat before the conversation is completed or the customer is inactive.
When the Fallback Email setting is turned on, Kustomer Chat will send any missed messages to the customer if they are inactive for over 5 minutes.
Note: You cannot edit the fallback email template and its contents at this time.
Business hours availability
Note: Define business hours for your brand with business schedules to use this setting. You can create up to 50 individual business schedules for the regions where you provide customer support.
If you have business hours defined for your brand, you can decide how your chat icon (the icon customers use to open the chat widget) appears for customers outside of your set business hours.
Select Appear Available to keep your chat icon available on your website outside of your set business hours. When customers open your chat outside of business hours, the chat widget displays your Available Online Greeting and allows customers to create new conversations from the chat.
Select Appear Offline to keep your chat icon available on your site and to display your available offline greeting outside of your business hours.
Learn how to create an offline chat greeting and prompt customers to leave a message with Chat Management: Design settings.
Select Hide Chat to remove the chat icon from your site outside of your business hours. Removing the chat prevents customers from opening chat to chat with your agents or conversational assistant.
Note: Customers who start a chat before the end of your business hours can continue their conversation. However, the chat icon will be hidden once the customer refreshes their browser.
Chat availability by time zone
Kustomer provides the ability to set the availability of your chat widget for multiple regions and time zones.
After you define the business schedule for a particular region, your developer team can use the schedule
attribute to include the individual ID for the schedule in your Kustomer.start()
function. You also can override the default business schedule. For more information, see the Kustomer Chat SDKs.
On Android, you can initialize the chat with options to override the business schedule id.
On iOS, you can use the businessScheduleId option on chat initialization to pass in a specific business schedule. See Chat iOS SDK.
Default assistant
You can assign a default conversational assistant for each channel and brand by going to Settings> Kustomer IQ > Conversational Assistants. Select the Rules tab to see a list of available conversational assistants for the available channels. Your chat widget will automatically implement the selected assistant for chats unless you have another assistant specified in the Chat SDK.
Learn more about conversational assistants in Kustomer.
Learn more about conversational assistant overrides in the Kustomer Chat SDK developer documentation.