A chatbot in front of a student
Someone choosing where to spend three years of their life is asked to pick from four buttons, none of which is their question.
A prospective student deciding on a course, a donor with a question about where their money goes, an alum trying to update their details — none of them should meet a decision tree. And none of it should be funded by a per-seat licence for volunteers who help out on Tuesdays.
The problems that come up when the people answering are not a full-time support team.
Someone choosing where to spend three years of their life is asked to pick from four buttons, none of which is their question.
Six people help out a few hours a week each. Per-agent pricing treats that as six full-time agents.
The widget sits there looking staffed at 11pm, and the visitor waits for a reply that is not coming until Monday.
One queue for everything, and every enquiry gets forwarded at least once before it reaches someone who can answer it.
There is no bot layer here to switch off, because there is no bot layer. Someone who opens the widget is queued for a person. The automation we do ship — canned responses, quick-reply chips, routing — makes the people answering faster; it does not stand in for them.
If nobody is on until Monday, the widget should say so rather than implying somebody is about to reply. Set opening hours per weekday in your own timezone, write a different greeting and a different set of chips for out-of-hours, and collect an email address instead of a stranded conversation.
Add the people who help out, assign them the department they know, and cap how many conversations any one of them holds. Plans are priced on limits published on the pricing page rather than on how many names are in your agent list — so a rota of volunteers is a rota, not a budget line.
Three of the six feature pages, picked for this audience rather than listed alphabetically.
One always-on socket carries messages, typing, presence and read receipts. No polling, no five-second lag, no bot maze in front of a human.
Live chatDepartments, per-domain assignment and per-agent concurrency limits — so nobody is drowning while a colleague sits idle.
Routing & teamsColours, position, greetings, quick replies, business hours and a pre-chat form — all set in the dashboard, none of it a redeploy.
Widget & brandingAsk us. It is not an automated tick-box — tell us who you are and what you do and we will talk about it properly.
Set business hours per weekday in your own timezone, with your own out-of-hours message. You can also suspend agent accounts between terms and reinstate them later.
Departments — admissions, fees, alumni — assigned per domain, and transfers that carry the full history so nobody has to repeat themselves.
What the conversation contains, plus session data such as the pages visited and a country resolved from IP. See our privacy page and security page; a DPA is available on request.
More of these on the general FAQ.
One line of code, no card to start. If it is not right for you, you will know within an afternoon — and we would rather hear why.
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