Availability, forms and service

This page describes how the chat works before and while someone answers: when your team is available, which details visitors give up front, what a guided flow with buttons looks like and what else visitors find in the window.

Availability

Under /app/projects/{id} in the Installation tab, section Basics, you set under Availability when your team answers:

• Time zone – default Europe/Berlin.
• Per weekday a tick and the times from and to in the format HH:MM.

Rules:

• No day ticked means “not configured”. Then Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm applies.
• The end must be after the start. Times across midnight cannot be entered. Such a row is skipped on saving.

Availability takes effect in several places: it decides about the “Leave a message” form (below), it is a condition for tooltips, and the response target only counts within these hours (see Team, console and notifications).

Leave a message (offline form)

Instead of the input field, the visitor gets a form with Name, Email and Message when all of the following apply:

• it is outside your availability,
• nobody from your team is signed in to the desk,
• the AI assistant is not answering (it is off or currently unavailable).

So if the AI assistant is switched on, it answers questions outside your hours too. If it hands over to your team and nobody is there, the visitor can choose whether to leave a message.

Only the message is required. If the visitor gives an email address, your team can reply by email later. The fields themselves are fixed; you change their labels with the offline.* keys under Texts and languages.

You can also open the form deliberately:

• as a leave a message tile on the home screen,
• in code with ReactiveChat('leaveMessage').

Pre-chat form

In the Texts & forms tab, section Pre-chat form, you ask visitors for their name and email before they write their first line. Someone who has introduced themselves gets an answer even after closing the chat.

• Show the pre-chat form – off by default. Off means: the visitor starts typing right away.
• Ask for the name, Ask for the email, Ask for the phone number – each with a Required tick. Required only works for fields you ask for. If you switch the form on without choosing a field, name and email apply.
• Sentence above the form – per language (German, English, Polish), 200 characters at most. Empty means: our translated text.

If no field is required, the visitor gets the link Continue without details.

The form does not appear:

• for signed-in users that your page reports with ReactiveChat('identify', …) (with user ID, email or name), see Technical integration,
• for visitors who have already filled it in once,
• in a conversation in which the visitor has already written.

If your project requires consent, consent comes first, then the pre-chat form, see Privacy and consent.

Guided flow

A guided flow first asks the visitor questions with buttons, such as “What is it about? Order / Return / Something else”, and then decides how to continue: the AI answers, a person takes over, a form appears or the flow ends. Leaving it empty means: the assistant answers straight from the knowledge base.

You will find it in the Installation tab, section Basics, field Guided flow, with an editor:

• Templates for lead, appointment, FAQ and returns.
• Step types: question with buttons, buttons plus free answer, input (for example asking for an order number), note and card.
• Test run right in the editor.
• Earlier versions: up to 100 saved versions per project can be loaded again.

Each button leads to another step or to one of these exits:

• @ki – the AI assistant takes over,
• @agent – handover to your team,
• @formular – the form for a message,
• @ende – the flow ends.

In JSON, a small flow looks like this:

{
  "start": "wurzel",
  "schritte": {
    "wurzel": {
      "text": "How can I help?",
      "optionen": [
        { "label": "My order", "ziel": "@ki" },
        { "label": "Talk to a person", "ziel": "@agent" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

On saving, your account checks the flow and rejects it if something is wrong:

• Every step needs a text or a card.
• Every target must be an existing step or an exit.
• A step without buttons, without input and without a target would be a dead end and is not allowed.
• Step names must not start with @.

Further limits: 60 steps at most, texts up to 800 characters, up to 8 buttons per step with 32 characters each at most. If more than five steps without a question follow one another, the flow stops.

When the flow starts: by default with the visitor's first message. Instead, you can have it start only through triggers, for example on certain pages, on exit intent, after a time on the page or after 30 seconds in the cart. The triggers are rules from Proactive messages, 10 at most per flow. If the visitor types something that matches no button, the AI takes over by default. Alternatively, the flow repeats the question.

Conversation transcript by email

In the Rules & service tab, section Conversation transcript by email:

• Offer visitors the conversation transcript by email – on by default. The chat window header shows an envelope icon that lets the visitor order the conversation so far to an address of their choice. Off: no envelope icon, and transcripts that were ordered but not yet sent are discarded.

Rating

After an answer from the assistant, the widget asks the visitor, after a short pause and once per conversation, for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating, plus an optional comment (1000 characters at most). Your team can ask for it themselves with the /rate command. There is no switch for this in your account; you change the texts with the csat.* keys. The widget reports ratings to your page via ReactiveChat('on', 'csat', …).

Attachments and message length

Visitors can attach files: images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, SVG), PDF, TXT and CSV. The server checks whether a file really is what its extension says. The limits depend on the plan and cannot be set in your account:

• Free – up to 2 MB per file, kept for 7 days, 1 GB of storage per workspace.
• Professional and Agency – up to 15 MB per file, kept for 90 days, 50 GB of storage per workspace.

Attachments are marked as Beta.

On the free plan a visitor message may be up to 1000 characters long, from Professional on up to 4000. Messages from your team may always have 4000 characters.

Personal data in messages

If a visitor types an email address, card number, IBAN, phone number or tax number, the widget points this out and replaces the detail with [VERBORGEN] when sending. This is always on and cannot be changed. The note text is under the pii.* keys.