Proactively inform customers of your offline status and encourage them to leave a message with contact information. Manage offline conversations separately and convert them into tickets for workflow alignment. Enable this experience for all or specific topics, showing an "Away (Offline)" label, and provide a prompt for customers to leave their email/phone and a message.

How will the Away (Offline) Experience appear for a customer

When a customer clicks on a Topic for which you have enabled Away (Offline) Experience, it gets activated. They

will be prompted to enter their email ID or their phone number.

Note: The reply text box will not be visible when the Away (Offline) experience is active.

Once they enter their details, it will appear as a chat message — and the reply text box will become visible. 

The customer can still send follow-up messages, and they will be appended to the same message thread. The Away (Offline) Experience prompt will be triggered again post 30 minutes from the last customer message.

How can team members differentiate Away (Offline) messages from regular chat messages?

It is easy to identify Away (Offline) messages in Freshchat with a half-moon icon. These include:

• Any new conversations initiated when you are Away (Offline)
• Any resolved conversations that were reopened because a customer reached out while you were away

This will help your team members identify messages that came in during out-of-office hours and prioritize their work.

You can also create custom views specifically for Away (Offline) messages.

How to set up the Away (Offline) Experience 

• Go to Admin Settings > Away Experience > switch the toggle to Enabled
  
• Select the Topics for which you want to trigger the Away (Offline) prompt and add your Away (Offline) message
• You can also add Away (Offline) messages in other languages based on your language settings.

• You can get the user’s phone number or email ID, and even add a thank you message at the end

Automatically convert Away (Offline) messages into tickets

Once you have integrated your account with Freshdesk, you can automatically convert your Away (Offline) messages into tickets.

Under Advanced settings, move the toggle to the right to enable ticket conversion. Set a duration after which the conversation will be auto-resolved and converted into a ticket. You can also label these conversations for easy identification later.

Note:
1. Once the time duration has expired, the conversation is resolved and converted into a ticket.
2. All the messages the customer sends within this time period get converted into one ticket.
3. This feature of converting the chats automatically into tickets by advanced settings is possible only on the omnichannel chat account