Visitors use the widget. Your team works from the agent desk, opened from the Chat button in the console's top bar.
That button is also where you go on and off shift:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Online / Go offline | Connect to or disconnect from chat |
| Open chat | The agent desk and team chat |
| Open conversations | The email, SMS and social inbox |
A status dot on the button shows whether you are connected, so you can tell at a glance without opening anything.
Three views
The chat panel has three tabs.
Agent Desk — support, team chat, queue and transfer. Sub-tabs cover Chats, Queue, AI and Customers, and the conversation list filters by Active, All or Archived. Staff chats are listed separately from customer ones.
Activity — live visitors, map, queue and journeys. A presence bar counts agents available, busy and away alongside the number of visitors online. Sub-tabs are Visitors, Map, Queue and Live Chats, and visitors can be filtered by name, URL or location.
The Map is worth knowing about: visitors currently on your site, placed geographically. Combined with the URL filter it tells you who is looking at what, right now.
Logs — the record of what happened.
When nobody is waiting, the desk says so and reminds you that you can start a chat with an online customer directly rather than only responding to requests.
Going on shift
Set your status from the Chat button or the desk's own Online toggle. The queue only routes to agents who are actually available, so status is not decorative — an agent left on the wrong status either receives chats they cannot answer, or none at all.
The queue
Visitors who arrive when no agent is free are queued, and can be shown their position.
From the queue you can see what is waiting and pick the next chat. Queue state is pushed live — position, statistics and updates arrive as they change rather than on a refresh.
Working a conversation
Open a chat and you get the conversation, the customer's profile, and their history.
Customer journey opens a drawer showing what the visitor did before they opened the chat — the same activity timeline the CRM records. An anonymous visitor who later identifies themselves keeps one continuous history rather than splitting in two.
Typing indicators, read status and online state are all live on both sides.
Handing a chat to someone else
Transfer moves the chat to another agent. The customer stays in the same conversation; the transfer is recorded and the new agent gets the history.
Takeover is the other direction — pulling a conversation someone else (or the AI) is handling. Useful when a supervisor needs to step in without asking the current agent to hand off first.
AI handover
The AI can answer while nobody is available, then step aside.
Assist puts the AI into a conversation. Resume hands control back to it after a human has been involved. Agents can pick which assistant is used from those configured for your organization.
That combination is the point: the AI takes first contact and the routine questions, a human takes over when it matters, and the conversation is one continuous thread rather than a bot session followed by a separate ticket.
A chat handled by the AI carries its full history into the human's view. The customer is not asked to repeat anything.
Proactive engagement
Rather than waiting to be asked, an agent can engage a visitor who is currently online — opening a conversation with someone browsing the site.
Calls
A chat can become a call. Call state moves through initiated, joined and ended, and the invitation appears in the conversation for the other side to accept.
Calls open in the platform's video conferencing, with connection configuration served by the platform so they work across networks and firewalls without you running signalling infrastructure.
Screen sharing and broadcast
An agent can share their screen or their camera to everyone watching.
Start a broadcast and choose the source:
| Source | What it shares |
|---|---|
| Screen | A window, tab or whole screen, with audio |
| Camera | The agent's camera and microphone |
Broadcasting opens a floating preview window you can move around the screen. It shows what you are sending, a LIVE badge, a microphone toggle and Stop Broadcasting. A LIVE indicator also appears in the chat panel's header, so you cannot forget you are on air while working in another tab.
Viewer count is shown while live. Stopping the broadcast ends every viewer's stream; so does stopping the share from the browser's own sharing control.
Each viewer gets their own peer connection, established when they join, so people can arrive part-way through and still see the stream.
Use a call for a conversation with one customer. Use a broadcast when several people should watch the same thing — a walkthrough, a demonstration, a product explanation.
Screen sharing captures the window or screen you pick, including notifications that appear over it. Share a single window rather than the whole screen when other material is open.
What the visitor sees
When a broadcast starts, the widget shows the video automatically — the visitor does not have to accept an invitation or click join. They can mute and unmute it, and expand it.
Broadcasts reach visitors who are not in a chat. The widget maintains a broadcast-only connection alongside the authenticated chat one, so someone who has the widget on the page but has never started a conversation still sees the stream. That is what makes it usable for a scheduled walkthrough or a launch, rather than only for people already talking to you.
Browsers block audio on video that starts playing without a user gesture, so the stream can begin muted with the viewer unmuting it. Say something on screen early, or expect the first few seconds to be unheard.
Proactive notices
Separately from broadcast, an agent can push a notice or a chat invitation to a visitor. It appears as a floating toast in the widget regardless of whether the visitor has a chat open — so you can invite someone into a conversation, or tell them something, without waiting for them to ask.
Sessions
Agents are warned before a session expires rather than being dropped mid-conversation, and expiry is signalled explicitly so the desk can prompt for re-authentication instead of silently failing to send.
Archiving
Closed chats can be archived and unarchived, keeping the active list to what still needs attention without deleting history.