Step into a live chat

Conversations arrive in the chatbot inbox. Open one and you see the whole exchange as the visitor sees it; take it over and you are answering directly, with the bot stepping aside.

Your reply appears in the conversation while it is sending. The reply box clears after the send succeeds; if it fails, your text stays available to retry. Taking ownership of a conversation still waits for confirmation, so two people cannot both be told they have taken over.

Take over when the conversation is worth a person — a real buying question, an unhappy customer, anything where the next sentence decides something. The bot is good at answering; it is not good at judging.

Getting told in time. Under Notifications:

• Email these addresses when a visitor starts a new chat on your embedded chatbot. The AI keeps handling the conversation until a teammate takes over from the chatbot inbox. Add addresses under Recipients — alerts@yourcompany.com
• Text me when a visitor starts a chat: Text these numbers the moment a visitor opens a chat, so someone can watch it live and step in. Each message costs, so this is off until you turn it on.

Email is fine for a workday; SMS is what makes live takeover realistic, because a visitor is on your site for about ninety seconds.

Test the alerting, don't assume it. Send a test — Sends the real alert to everyone above, so you can confirm it arrives. Save your changes first, then send a test. If nothing arrives you are told why: {{channel}}: nobody to send to yet. or {{channel}}: turned off.

Notification settings could not be loaded — This usually means the website chatbot is not switched on for this organisation, or your account does not have access to it. Ask an administrator, then try again.

If nobody is watching, the bot carries on and escalates into a ticket where it cannot help, so nothing is lost by not being there: What a chat turns into