Maisie's live chat is quite different to any live chat you would have experienced in the past. Maisie encourages your website visitors to self-serve first by providing automated answers to questions, product recommendations, etc. For more complex queries, you can allow your customers to ask Maisie to speak to a customer service person via live chat. However, you are in complete control over where and when in any conversation you wish to offer your customers the option to live chat.
We have created this video to explain how Maisie live chat works and how to set it up and add it into your chatbot conversation flows.
Maisie live chat works like this:
- During the business hours you set on your live chat settings screen, when a customer selects the live chat option it will open a live chat window where they can start chatting. You will receive a browser notification that someone is wanting to chat (browser notifications can be activated with the toggle in the top right corner of the Live chat inbox screen). If no one responds to the customer within a certain time period (10 seconds - can again be changed on the live chat settings screen) the Maisie system will also send an email to your email address to say there is someone waiting on live chat.
- If no one responds to the customer within 30 seconds (can be changed on the live chat settings screen) then Maisie will tell the customer there is no one available at the moment and will ask them for their query, email address and first name. If the customer provides this information it will be saved to your live chat inbox and an email will be sent to you with these details. If the customer does not provide an email then this will not occur.
- Outside of business hours, or when an agent sets themself to unavailable status (on the live chat inbox screen), Maisie will just tell the customer no one is available and again will ask them for their query, email address and first name. If the customer provides this information an email will be sent to you with these details.
In both scenarios 2 & 3 the email you're sent will have the customer's email address automatically included as the reply-to email address so you can simply click reply to send an email back to them.
We don't ask a customer to provide an email address before starting a live chat as that is the best way to discourage most people from using the live chat!
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