Chat

A chat launcher puts a chat on your site: visitors tap the disc and talk to you in a small panel. A bot answers first, straight away, from what you have taught it in the Knowledge. When it cannot help, or the visitor asks for a person, the chat comes to you in Content > Chats. When nobody is available, the visitor leaves their name and email instead, so nobody is left waiting. There is no AI here: the bot only ever says what you wrote.

Setting it up

1. In Launchers, add a launcher and choose the Chat action. Its chat settings are the greeting, the bot's name, whether the bot answers (off: every message goes to a person), whether visitors can ask for a person, and when to ask for a name and email: when nobody is available (the usual), always before putting them through, or never.
2. Open Chats > Knowledge and replace the four example entries (marked Example) with your own - or use Remove the examples.
3. Ask a few questions in Try the bot the way a visitor would, and add phrasings until it answers them.

The Knowledge

Each entry is a question, other ways of asking it (one per line), a few keywords, the answer and up to five buttons under it (a page on your site such as /contact, a web address, mailto: or tel:). Answers can use Markdown: bold, italic, lists and links.

How the bot matches: it ignores small words (the, is, your), meets plurals and tenses at one root (bookings, booked, booking), treats common words as the same (cost, price, fee, charge; open, hours, close; delivery, shipping, postage; and so on), forgives a one-letter typo in longer words, and gives rarer words more weight. Then:

• One clear match - it answers.
• A few close ones - "Did you mean...?" with up to three choices and None of these.
• Nothing close - it says it does not know yet, offers a person, and puts the question on the Unanswered list. After two misses in a row it offers a person again.

It also understands "can I talk to a person", "real human", "customer service" and similar (it hands over), "hello" and "thanks". How sure it must be before answering is in the Chats settings cog: Strict, Balanced (the default) or Relaxed.

Unanswered lists what visitors asked that the bot could not answer, with how often. Click one to Make an entry from it, or right-click to add it to the closest entry as another way of asking, to dismiss it or to delete it. This is the quickest way to teach the bot.

Switch an entry off (right-click it) to stop the bot using it without losing it. The answered N times count shows which entries earn their keep.

Answering visitors: Chats

Content > Chats is the inbox. Its sidebar badge counts the chats that need you: a visitor Waiting for a person (a live dot; red after five minutes), a Message left when nobody was available, and chats with new messages since your reply. Waiting chats are listed first, the longest wait at the top.

• Available for chats - on while this screen is open. That is what tells the bot someone can take a chat. Leave the screen or switch it off and, when nobody else is available, visitors are asked for their details instead. You get a notification when a visitor asks for a person or leaves a message.
• Click a chat to read it; type a reply and press Ctrl+Enter (or Send). Once you reply, the bot stays quiet in that chat. You can also reply to a chat the bot is handling.
• Right-click a chat (or its ⋮) to email the visitor, copy their address, open the page they were on, end the chat (they see that it ended) or delete it.
• What you type is kept as a draft for each chat until you send it.

The settings cog sets how visitors see your name (first name, full name or "The team"), how sure the bot must be, how long ended chats are kept (90 days to begin with), and how many new chats the whole site takes in an hour (300 to begin with; each visitor can start at most 6 an hour and send 120 messages).

What visitors see

The greeting, then the conversation. Their chat carries on across pages and reloads in the same browser for a day (two weeks after they leave a message). They can tap Talk to a person (or Leave a message where nobody chats live) at any time, and End chat. Nothing moves for a visitor who asked the site to keep still.

Tidy-up and privacy

• Every hour: chats with the bot quiet for two hours end; waiting and open chats quiet for a day end; ended chats older than the keep setting are deleted with their messages - chats that only ever talked to the bot and left no details go after a week. A message left for the team is kept until someone ends it.
• A visitor's chat is theirs by a random key kept in their browser; the site stores only a fingerprint of it. Messages are plain text, up to 1,000 characters.
• Chats, messages, Knowledge and the Unanswered list are kept in MongoDB where your site has it, in files otherwise.

Who can do what

System > Roles > Chats: View (see chats, the Knowledge and the Unanswered list), Answer (reply, end chats, show as available) and Manage (edit the Knowledge and settings, delete chats). Admin has all three to begin with.