Chat settings
Chat answers your visitors from your public content and hands the conversation to a person when it should. A handful of settings decide how it behaves: what it says about your availability, who gets pulled in when a visitor needs a human, whether it saves contact details to your CRM, and how it learns from thumbs up and down. Nothing is on more than it should be — adding someone to your email list, in particular, never happens unless you turn it on.
Availability instructions
Chat can answer questions about your hours and how fast someone will hear back, in plain language. You write a sentence or two — when your team usually responds, what happens after hours, how quickly to expect a follow-up — and Chat uses it when a visitor asks. It's not a scheduling grid. It's a description Chat reads and puts in its own words.
Handing off to a person
When a visitor asks to talk to someone — "can someone follow up," "I need help with this" — Chat can escalate. It collects their email and a short summary of what they need, and it carries the conversation, the page they were on, and any links it referenced into the handoff. So whoever picks it up isn't starting cold.
Who gets notified
You choose who hears about an escalation. Pick team members and they're notified in the console. You can also set a fallback email address, so a notification lands in an inbox even when no one is watching the console. Set one, the other, or both — the only thing to avoid is an escalation with nowhere to go.
Saving contact details to your CRM
If you pick a CRM app in Chat's settings, Chat can create or update a contact when a visitor volunteers their details in the conversation — email, name, company, whatever they actually say. It only stores what the visitor gives it. It doesn't guess private facts, and a visitor's details never become something Chat quotes back to the public.
Saving someone as a contact is not the same as subscribing them to your emails. Subscribing a visitor to future updates only happens if you turn that on. By default, Chat never subscribes anyone — a captured contact is a record for you to follow up on, not a signup. If you do turn subscription on, visitors can still opt out.
Thumbs up and down
Visitors can rate whether an answer helped. A thumbs up is kept as private context that pairs the question with the good answer, so your team can see what's working. A thumbs down is flagged for review, so you find the questions where your public content or Chat's behavior needs work. It's a quality signal you read — not something visitors see about each other.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
No. It never subscribes anyone unless you turn subscription on. By default a captured contact is a record for follow-up, not a signup — and even with subscription on, visitors can opt out.
Your public content — website pages, blog posts, knowledge base articles, developer docs, and public files. It won't answer from private CRM records, form submissions, or account internals. If public content can't answer, it says so instead of guessing.
The team members you pick get a console notification, and a fallback email address you set gets an email. Use either or both.
If you've picked a CRM app, Chat saves what the visitor volunteers as a contact. It only stores what they actually provide, and it never uses those details as public answers.