It started simple
The chat boxes that turned up on websites from around 2008 were basic: a box in the corner and a person on the other end who typed back. Plenty of them looked rough, but a visitor with a question could ask it and hear from someone who worked there.
Then chat became a feature of bigger products. It was attached to CRMs, help desks and sales tools, and each of those brought their own ideas: routing rules, bots that ask several questions before you’re allowed to type, windows that open by themselves, ticket numbers for a question about delivery. Each addition made sense to someone. Together they stack up like washing-up piled on top of dirty dishes after dinner, until nobody wants to start on it.
We tried a lot of these products while building Vidual Inbox, and the chat nearly always felt like an afterthought. It sat next to the shared inbox rather than inside it, with its own settings, its own notifications and its own record of who a customer was.
Two jobs
Our live chat does two things.
When you’re working, it assumes you’re there. You set your hours once in Inbox. During those hours, a message from your website arrives in Inbox like any other conversation, you’re notified, and you reply from Inbox. The visitor sees your reply in the chat on your site.
When you’re not, it says so. Outside your hours the chat tells the visitor when you’re back, and they can still leave a message along with their email address. It waits in Inbox until you pick it up.
If you run the business on your own, time you block out on your Inbox calendar counts as well. Block out an afternoon and the chat says you’re away until you’re back, instead of promising a reply in a few minutes that won’t come. With more than one person on the account, it assumes someone else is covering.
Answers from your own site, at any hour
Alongside the chat sits Ask. Whether you’re working or not, a visitor can ask a question about your business and get an answer from what your website already says. When you switch it on, Inbox reads the pages of your site and keeps the text. A question such as “do you ship to Ireland?” is matched against it, and a small amount of AI turns the passage it finds into a short answer, with a link to the page it came from.
It only answers from your site. If the answer isn’t there, it doesn’t make one up, and a link to email you is always one tap away.
Nobody pretending to be you
We didn’t want a bot posing as a member of your team, and we don’t think visitors want one either. Software that greets someone with a made-up name and then can’t help them is worse than no chat at all. So the two are kept apart: Chat is always a person on your team, and Ask is presented as answers from your site, never as someone typing.
The details
We spent a long time on how the chat looks and behaves on phones, where a lot of visitors will meet it, and just as long on desktop. The script that installs it loads asynchronously, so it doesn’t hold up your pages while they load.
Its colours follow the accent you choose in Inbox, so it matches the rest of your brand without any extra setting up. If you want the chat in a different colour from your emails, you can set one for it under Integrations. The text on top switches between white and dark on its own, so it stays readable whichever colour you pick.
Your website is a channel
Inbox treats every place a customer can reach you as a channel: email, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. Your website belongs on that list, and live chat is what puts it there. Messages from all of them land in the same inbox, so you reply to everyone from one place. And a customer who chats on your site and later emails or messages you on Instagram is one person in Inbox, with their history together, rather than a stranger on each channel. We’ve also written about how live chat works for a small team, including who picks up a chat and what happens out of hours.
Try it
We haven’t said much about live chat, but it’s one of the most useful things in Inbox. You’ll find it under Integrations. Installing it means pasting a short snippet into your site, the same way you’d add Google Analytics. If you’d rather not touch your site’s code, get in touch and we’ll help you set it up.