Office hours and chat settings

Where to find them

These settings are in Administration › Settings, for the site you've picked. Admins and managers can change them. Each part has its own Save.

Your site's name, address, image and status

• Property Name: what the site is called in the dashboard and in the chat.
• Status: Active takes chats. Inactive switches the chat off on your website: visitors who open it see that chat is unavailable. Your inbox and settings are kept.
• Property URL: your website's address, used by the installation check.
• Property Image: your logo, shown in the chat (when the header shows your logo) and on your help center. It's cropped to a square; 512×512 or larger looks best.
• Property ID: the ID in your install code. We may ask for it if you write to us.

Assigning chats

• Assign new chats automatically: each new chat goes to the agent with the fewest open chats who is online, takes chats from this site and has the dashboard open. When it's off, new chats wait unassigned in the inbox, and anyone can pick them up.
• Most open chats per agent: agents with this many open chats are skipped by automatic assigning. 0 means no limit.

Quiet chats

Close a chat when nobody has written for a time you choose, from minutes to days, or never. A closed chat stays in the inbox and opens again when the visitor writes.

Office hours

Switch on Keep office hours to open your chat only at the times you answer. Outside them the chat shows Away, even if someone is online, and tells visitors when you're back, in their own time.

1. Choose your Time zone. The hours are in this zone.
2. Tick the days you answer chats and set their hours. Add hours gives a day a second set, for example around lunch. You can copy one day's hours to every open day.
3. Choose what happens Outside office hours: Keep chatting (visitors still write, and messages wait in your inbox) or Hide the chat (the button disappears until you open again).
4. Save. The page tells you whether your chat is open right now.

With office hours off, your chat is open whenever someone on your team is online.

Banned visitors

Ban someone from a chat's menu in the inbox, with a reason only your team sees. You can also block the network they wrote from, which helps against someone who clears their browser, but can block others on the same network, like an office.

Banned visitors see that chat is unavailable. They're listed here, with who banned them and when. Unban lets them chat again.

JavaScript API

At the bottom of the page is your site's secret key for showing signed-in customers in the chat. See Identify signed-in customers.