Chat: Capture requests outside of business hoursUpdated 4 days ago
Your business hours determine when a chat integration is available for customers to talk to your support team in real time. When it’s outside of business hours or a chat integration is offline, your offline capture settings allow your customers to send an asynchronous message to your support team and receive a reply over email.
Requirements
- Available on all Helpdesk plans
- The account owner and admins can customize offline capture
Understand the offline capture workflow
When your chat is offline, the chat widget on your store or website displays a message letting customers know that messages submitted while chat isn’t available will be replied to over email. Customers can leave a message through the offline capture workflow and once completed, a new ticket is created in your helpdesk for agents to respond to when they’re back online.
Collect details with offline capture
When your customers choose to leave a message during offline capture, they’ll interact with standardized prompts in the chat widget that ask them for relevant details like their email address and the reason for the support request. The phrasing of the standard offline capture prompts can be customized unless otherwise specified.
| Standard message | How it’s used | Can be customized |
| Leave a message and we will email you once we are online. | This message is displayed to a customer who opens the chat on your store or website. | Yes |
| What can we help you with? | This message immediately follows the opening message and asks the customer to select from five suggested replies. | Yes |
| Track Order Report Issue Cancel Order Product Question | Suggested replies to the “What can we help you with?” question. Appear in the chat as a button. | Yes |
| Other | This suggested reply always appears in the chat for the customer to select as an answer to the “What can we help you with?” question. | No |
| Please type the subject: | If the customer selects Other, they receive this message in response, prompting them to describe their issue. They won’t receive this message if they select one of the other suggested replies. | Yes |
| Do you have any additional details to share to help us assist you? | After selecting a suggested reply, the customer receives this message and is able to freely type a response in the chat. | Yes |
| How can we contact you? | If the contacting customer doesn’t already have a profile in Gorgias, they’ll receive this message prompting them to enter their email address. | Yes |
| Would you like to add any more information? | The customer receives this message after entering their email address, giving them one last opportunity to freely type a message. | Yes |
| That's all | This appears as a button in the chat that the customer clicks to end the interaction. | Yes |
| Thanks for your message, we will email you soon. | This is the sign off message. Once they receive this message, the customer will also have the option to leave another message and create a new ticket if needed. | Yes |
Offline capture confirmation email
Once the customer completes the offline capture workflow, Gorgias Bot will send an email to the address they provided (or to the email address already on file) with a summary of their responses. When an agent picks up the ticket to respond, the conversation will continue in the email thread that Gorgias Bot initiated. Agents can see the offline capture responses the customer submitted and the follow-up email from Gorgias Bot in the conversation thread.
The confirmation email is formatted with the following standard messages:
| Standard message | How it’s used | Can be customized |
| Hello | The greeting in the body of the email. | Yes |
| Thanks for reaching out, our team will get back to you soon regarding the following request: | This appears in the body of the email after the greeting, and before the offline capture summary. | Yes |
| Offline capture summary | The responses the customer submitted are included in the body of the email. | No |
| The {chatTitle} team | The email sign off. {chatTitle} is a variable, and will be replaced by the title of the chat integration the customer used to submit the offline capture. | Yes |
Customize offline capture prompts
The standard offline capture prompts are designed to collect enough information from your customer for your support agent to start working on their issue as soon as they pick up the ticket. If you deal with specialized products or support processes, you may want to customize the prompts to collect more specific details from the customer, or to better reflect your brand’s voice and tone. When you customize the prompts, you can alter the text that appears in the chat for each of the chat integration’s supported languages. It isn’t possible to make changes to the flow of messages, or add additional quick reply options.
- From your helpdesk, click the Settings icon in the bottom-left corner.
- In the menu, locate Channels, then select Chat.
- Search for and select a chat integration from the list.
- Select the Language tab.
- Select the language you’d like to customize from the list.
- Scroll to Offline capture.
- The standard prompts are listed on the left. Enter the text you’d like instead in the Enter custom value text box next to the standard prompt to replace it.
- Click Save changes.
When a customer interacts with your chat while it’s offline, they’ll see your replacement text instead of the standard prompts. If you leave the custom value text box blank, the default prompt will always be sent.
Limitations
- Offline capture is automatically enabled on chats when it’s outside of your business hours. You can also set your chat to offline to enable offline capture during business hours.
- Your custom prompts must be fewer than 5000 characters.
- There is a 100 character limit on the field that collects a shopper’s email address.
- If Article Recommendations are enabled, the shopper won't see the subject quick reply options at the start of the offline capture. Instead, they will be able to type freely so that the automation has a chance to recommend an article. If there's no article to recommend or the shopper selects "No, I need more help", then the offline capture flow will continue to obtain their email address.
