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Email replies to visitors who left the chat

Rolling out: not yet switched on. This page describes how it will work once it is enabled.

Visitors often close the tab, move to another page of your store, or lock their phone before a teammate answers. When that happens, AskVault emails them the reply so it still reaches them.

When an email is sent

An email goes out only when all of these are true:

  • The conversation is on your website widget or hosted chat page.
  • A teammate sent a public reply from the inbox. Internal notes are never emailed.
  • The visitor's email is on the conversation: they left it in a form, the AI collected it, or your site passed it with setUser (see identity verification).
  • The visitor hasn't seen the reply three minutes later. If their chat window received it, or they reopened the chat and it loaded, no email is sent.
  • The visitor hasn't turned these emails off.

Several replies sent close together go out as one email that contains only the replies the visitor hasn't seen.

What the visitor receives

  • The reply text and the teammate's display name, with your workspace name.
  • A View the conversation link. It opens a read-only page showing this one conversation, and nothing else from your workspace. The link expires after 7 days.
  • A Continue the chat link to your hosted chat page, if you have published one, or else to the page on your site where the chat started.
  • A Stop these emails link. It asks the visitor to confirm, then stops these emails for that address across your workspace.

Limits

  • An address your site hasn't verified with identity verification gets at most one email per conversation per hour. Replies sent during that hour arrive together in the next email.
  • If an email can't be sent (for example, a mail-server error), it is not retried. The reply is still in the conversation and loads the next time the visitor opens the chat.

When sending fails

Rolling out, not yet switched on. Until this step is on, a failed email is not retried (see above).

Once it is on:

  • If the email can't be sent because of a temporary problem, such as the mail server being busy or unreachable, AskVault tries again: after about 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours and 15 hours. After that, about a day later, it stops.
  • Before each new try, AskVault checks again. If the visitor has come back and seen the reply, or has turned these emails off, nothing is sent. The visitor never gets the same email twice.
  • If the visitor's mail server says the address doesn't exist (a hard bounce), AskVault doesn't try again, and it doesn't email that address again from that conversation.

Visitors can reply to the email

Rolling out: not yet switched on. This part is a separate step and turns on after the email itself.

Once it is on:

  • The email comes from your workspace's name, so the visitor recognises who wrote. Once you verify your own sender address, it comes from that address too.
  • The visitor can reply to the email. Their answer appears in the same conversation in your Help Desk, as a new customer message, so your teammate sees it with the full chat history above it. Quoted text from the earlier email is removed.
  • A teammate working the conversation gets the same new-message alert as when the visitor writes in the chat. If the conversation had been resolved, it reopens. If it was snoozed, it wakes up.
  • Every email carries its own private reply address. That address only ever leads back to that one conversation, and stops working after 30 days.
  • You don't need to set up an email channel or a hosted email address for this. Replies come back into the website chat they belong to.
  • Replies are accepted only from the address the email was sent to. A forwarded copy that someone else answers, and automatic out-of-office replies, are not added to the conversation.

Your teammate answers in the Help Desk as usual. If the visitor still isn't on your site, they get the reply by email again.

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