How to configure and use the offline form
The JivoChat offline form allows visitors from your website to send messages even when there are no agents online in the chat. You can still receive messages and feel free to contact those customers at any time in the future from inside our application, even when the visitor is no longer on your website.
We strongly recommend using the JivoChat apps to answer all offline messages. This will help to keep all your communication with clients in one place only.
When there are no assigned agents online in the JivoChat application, the chat widget will show up differently to your website visitors. They will see an offline widget just like the one below:
By pressing the widget or after receiving a trigger for the offline form, the offline form pops up to the visitor of your website with a space for leaving a message to your team.
After writing a message, they receive a request to leave some contact details to send the message to your team. This is necessary and important so that you are able to contact your customers by email or phone to answer their request.
The form is configured in your contact form menu. For more details, you can check our contact form tutorial clicking here.
The form will check if the data entered is valid. For example, if the email inserted by the visitor has a correct format of an email address, and if the phone number has only numbers on it and at least 5 digits.
After pressing "Send", visitors will see an extra message saying they will be contacted soon. You may customized the messages inside the offline form to what you believe will give better results and that will be as clear as possible on how the message will be handled by your team. Visitors are also free to write extra messages after filling the contact form, if necessary.
When the visitor clicks "Send", your team will also receive a chat notification in the Inbox section of the JivoChat app and an email will be sent to you to inform about the new offline message you've received. Feel free to answer it at any time in the future. Offline messages stay inside the Inbox until they are accepted by an agent. Answers sent from the app when such visitors are not online in the website anymore are sent directly to the visitors' email addresses (we recommend making it mandatory for visitors to leave their email in the offline form).
Please notice that if you're a JivoChat PRO user and you're in "Away" status when receiving an offline message, you may accept the message while the visitor is still on the website and chat live with the visitor. The visitor will see a message in the chat widget when an agent joins the conversation.
As mentioned above, if you'd like to change the texts of the offline form, please feel free to do it and adapt it to your website. Here are some important tutorials that contains settings which affects the texts of the offline form:
- How to set up triggers
- How to change the Design of the chat widget
- How to change the language of the chat widget
If you have any questions or issues, feel free to contact us at info@jivochat.com or directly in the chat on our website.
