Chatting works much like popular chat clients such as Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, AIM etc. You see each message the user types in a blue speech bubble.

Use the reply box at the bottom of the window to send your response. You can use the 

 button or just press Enter/Return on your keyboard.

Your replies are shown in gray bubbles.

When a user has read your message, it is marked with a green double-tick icon: 

You can mouse over the icon to see when they read your message.

You can see what pages the user is viewing on your web portal or website as this will appear as notification. This gives you context for their issue or question: you can check which product they’re looking at, that they are in the right place while following troubleshooting instructions etc.

You can format your reply in a similar manner to a ticket message. See the  Replying to a ticket section for more details. You can attach files to chat messages just as you can with a ticket reply, except that drag and drop only works with images. Users can also send you files.

Between the formatting bar and the Send button are two buttons specific to Chat.

The 

 button  Creating a ticket linked to a chat. This is useful if you can’t resolve the user’s issue during the chat and need to track it in the ticket system.

Note that you need the user’s email address to create a linked ticket. If they haven’t entered one, get them to tell it to you before the chat ends.

The 

 button ends the chat.

After the chat ends, the user will be emailed a chat transcript if they have provided an email address.

Chat details

At the top of the tab you can see:

• the messages sent by the agent

• the chat’s ID number

• the department selected by the user, which you can change

• the label field - you can label a chat as with a ticket or user

Chat visitor information

During the chat you can switch to the Visitor Information tab to get details about the user:

• IP Address

• User Agent (this describes what web browser they’re using)

• Session Start Time (the time they arrived at your web portal or site in their current browsing session)

• Session Landing Page (the first page they arrived at this session)

• Initial Visit Time & Initial Landing Page (the time and page they arrived at when they first visited your portal/site, as recorded by browser cookies)

Block user

If a chat user is abusive, trying to waste your time, or should be excluded from chat for some other reason, you can switch to the Block User tab and block them for the next 24 hours.

Enter a brief description of why you chose to block the user, then click Block User.

You can optionally select Block IP address. This prevents all chat attempts from that user’s last IP address. Note that if the user was chatting from a shared network (such as a business, university or wi-fi hotspot), blocking their IP may prevent all users on that network from chatting. Also, users accessing the internet from home or mobile broadband may not have fixed IP addresses.