Availability, callbacks and notifications

This page answers two questions: what does a visitor experience when nobody is available? And how does your team find out about a visitor who is waiting?

Opening hours

You set when your team is available on the project page, Installation tab, Availability section: days, time from and to, and the time zone. If no day is ticked, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm applies.

Outside these hours the widget shows “Nobody is here right now.” and, if known, when you will be back. If someone is signed in to the desk anyway, they can keep answering.

The offline form

If nobody is available, the visitor can leave a message: name, email and text. The form appears

• when the widget starts outside opening hours, no agent is online and the AI assistant is not answering,
• when a visitor asks for a person and nobody is there; they first choose between “I want to ask something else” and “I want to leave a message”,
• via the “Leave a message” tile on the widget's home screen,
• when the connection to the chat cannot be established at the moment.

The message arrives in your desk as an ordinary visitor message, with sensitive details masked. If no connection can be established, the widget sends it over plain HTTPS and resends it later if necessary.

reactive.chat does not send an automatic reply mail to the visitor. The visitor sees “Thanks, we'll reply by email.”, and your team replies to the address given.

Response target and service targets

• Response target (Rules & service tab) – within how many minutes your team usually aims to answer; 0 means no target. From this the widget shows “Usually replies in … min”.
• Service targets by priority – for the priorities Low, Normal, High and Urgent, one deadline each for the first reply from a person, for follow-up replies and for resolution, in minutes within opening hours (0 means off). The priority comes from the tags low, high and urgent; otherwise Normal applies. The resolution deadline pauses as soon as a person from your team has replied.

Conversations at risk are marked in the desk. You see breaches from the last 30 days in the project settings and under Outcomes (see Reports).

Emails to your team

“A visitor is waiting and nobody is in the desk” – when a visitor gets no reply for more than 5 minutes and nobody from the team is connected. Conversations older than 24 hours do not count. Per project you set how often under Rules & service, Email notification:

• Off – no email (default)
• Immediate – up to one per minute
• Throttled – at most every 15 minutes
• Digest – only on the quarter hour

The mail goes to owners and admins, as one digest per workspace, and at most once per conversation and hour.

Weekly email “Where your customers got stuck this week” – on Mondays, with the pages on which the frustration radar measured the most signals, and only in weeks with signals. You switch it on per project in the reports; it is off by default.

Unsubscribing yourself: each person can switch off both mails for themselves, under Account, Notifications tab, or with the “Unsubscribe just me” link in the mail itself. Mails about sign-in, password, invitations and security cannot be unsubscribed from.

Emails to your visitors

• Email me this conversation – the visitor orders their conversation to an address themselves, at most once every 10 minutes. On by default; you switch it off under Rules & service, Conversation transcript by email. When you switch it off, transcripts already ordered but not yet sent are discarded as well.
• “New reply to your support case” – for cases in the customer portal, only to customers with a verified identity, with a link into the portal and without the text of the reply (see The agent desk).

Push notifications

So that your team is notified even when the desk is closed, there is web push. In the desk click Push and then Enable on this device. After that you choose under For:

• New conversation
• New visitor message (mine and unanswered)
• Handover to me or to the team
• New callback request
• Service target exceeded

You can also set Quiet hours. The list shows your devices, with Remove. Up to 10 devices per person.

• The notification only names the event and the project, never the text of the message.
• Anyone who has the desk open at the moment gets no push; the bell speaks up there instead.
• On iPhone and iPad, push works from iOS 16.4 and only if you have added the desk to your home screen as an app via “Add to Home Screen”.

Callbacks

If it is switched on, a visitor can ask for a call in the widget with Request a callback, with a time slot if they like. The settings are in the desk's Callbacks card under Project settings (owners and admins): “Offer callbacks in the widget” and “Visitors may choose a time slot”.

In the desk the Callbacks card shows the requests with the states open, assigned, done and not reached. You take a request with Assign to me, mark it as Done or Not reached, and can have another go later with Try again (after 30 minutes at the earliest, at most five times).

If click-to-call is set up for your account, you start the call with Call directly from the desk: first your own phone rings, then the visitor is connected. You enter your number under My number for click-to-call. This feature has not yet been tried out against the real telephone service.

Voice call, video and co-browsing

On paid plans you can talk to a visitor who is online right now in the desk's Call & co-browsing card:

• Voice call and Video call, with microphone and camera on and off,
• Show my screen or Ask visitor to share screen,
• Request co-browsing – once the visitor agrees, you choose an element on their page, optionally write a note to go with it and click Point (highlight) or Scroll to.

Co-browsing here only means pointing and scrolling: you cannot click or type anything for the visitor, and you see the labels of buttons, links and headings, but not what they type into fields. The visitor sees a notice and can end it at any time. Nothing is recorded.

Requirements: switched on in the project settings (“Voice/video call and screen sharing”, “Co-browsing (point/scroll)”), the visitor's consent, the right to reply. Behind strict company firewalls a call connection may not be established.

Campaigns

From the Professional plan you reach out to visitors in a targeted way with Campaigns (/app/projects/…/campaigns, owners and admins). On the free plan you can look at everything but not save or start.

Chat campaigns show connected visitors a message in the chat window with up to three reply buttons. You decide who sees it with filters: pages, minimum time on page, origin and UTM details, first-time or returning visitors, country, language, device, signed in or anonymous and, if you like, orders from the customer data. You can test a variant B with its own share and set a schedule.

So that nobody is overwhelmed: campaigns never appear during an ongoing conversation, at most one message in 10 minutes (together with tooltips), and only with consent. What is counted is “Delivered”, “Seen”, “Clicked”, “Conversation started” and “Goal reached”. “Seen” means displayed, not provably read.

WhatsApp broadcasts only go to contacts with documented consent and only with a template approved by Meta. When you import the contacts, you provide proof of consent. A contact unsubscribes with STOP and subscribes again with START. This feature requires the WhatsApp integration and has not yet been tried out against the live service.

How you design proactive messages, tooltips and rules is described in the Customisation part.