You can inform chat users about your unavailability through the "Away Experience." You can prompt customers and leads to leave a message and contact information for later follow-up. This proactive approach manages expectations, reduces frustration, and allows you to handle 'Away' conversations separately. You can later convert these conversations into tickets to align with your workflow.


You can enable the Away Experience for all your Topics or for specific Topics. When a visitor or customer clicks on a Topic to start a conversation with you, it will be visible to them in Away mode.

In the Away mode, the Topic name will have an ‘offline’ label attached to it, and there will be an away prompt for the user to enter their email id/phone number (which you can choose) and a message.

How will the Away Experience appear for a customer?

When a customer clicks on a Topic for which you have enabled Away Experience, it gets activated. The user will be prompted to enter their email ID or phone number and a message. 



Note: When Away Experience prompt is active the reply text box will not be visible.



Once they enter their email ID and message and hit send, it will appear as a chat message and the reply text box will become visible. 



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

 

How can team members differentiate away messages from normal chat messages


It is easy to identify away messages in Chat. Any ‘NEW’ conversation initiated during your out-of-office hours and reopened conversations (previously resolved and now reopened due to customer's message during your out of office hours) will be affixed with a half moon icon. This indicates that it is an ‘Away’ message. 

 

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



How to create custom views for away conversations

You can also create custom views specifically for Away messages. 
Go to Inbox dropdown, Add Custom View >  Show 'Away Conversations' only.


How to set up Away Experience 


Go to Admin Settings > Channels > Chat Settings > Away Experience and switch the toggle to Enabled



Select the Topics for which you want to trigger the away prompt and add your away message. You can also add away messages in other languages based on your language settings.



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



When will a conversation be marked as away:

A conversation will be marked as 'Away' conversation when,

  • It gets started (created or reopened) outside business hours through the Away Experience flow.

  • An ongoing conversation has a follow-up message outside business hours will be marked as an ‘Away’ conversations.

You can identify away conversations with a ‘Moon’ icon marked next to it.

We will unmark an Away conversation when,

  • The conversation gets resolved.

  • The end customer messages on the ‘Away’ conversation during business hours.

Bots take priority over Away Experience and Business Hours for Chat. If all three are enabled simultaneously, Bots will override Away Experience and Business Hours.