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Availability, forms and service

When your team is available, what visitors see outside those hours, the pre-chat form, guided flows with buttons, transcript by email, rating, attachments and message length.

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:

Rules:

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:

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:

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.

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

The form does not appear:

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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.

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