Live Chat

Overview

Live Chat brings instant support interactions to your Productlane widget, helping to improve conversions and increase trust with your customers. We recommend activating Live Chat only if you can staff it and maintain very short response times.

Live Chat always takes precedence over the widget's feedback contact form. When Live Chat is on, the widget shows the chat interface instead of the contact form, even if your widget's default view is set to Feedback. This applies everywhere the feedback form would otherwise appear, including direct API submissions.

Set it up

1. Turn on Live Chat
   To set up the live chat, head over to Settings → Widget and activate it. The contact form on your widget automatically turns into a chat interface. We recommend sending the user's email through your widget snippet. Head over to the widget settings to find out how to set this up.

2. Set response time
   Set a maximum response time that helps manage expectations with your users.

3. Set office hours
   Choose your time zone and available office hours to manage expectations about when your customers will receive a response from you.

What visitors see in the widget header

The subtitle under your team's name in the widget header adapts to your office hours configuration:

• If you have not configured any office hours, the widget always shows your response time promise, for example "We usually respond in 24 hours".

• If you have configured office hours and the current time falls within them, the widget shows that your team is available now instead of the response time message.

• If you have configured office hours and the current time falls outside them, the widget shows when your team will be back (based on the visitor's local timezone) instead of the response time message.

This means the "We usually respond in X hours" message is only ever shown when no office hours are set, or as a fallback if Live Chat itself is turned off. It will not appear during your configured working hours.

Conversations promoted from the AI Agent

When a customer asks the AI Agent for a human, and Live Chat is enabled, the conversation moves into Live Chat on the same thread instead of starting a new one. The customer sees a confirmation message and keeps reading the same conversation, now with a live connection to your team. Your team sees the full history, including the earlier AI Agent messages, in that one thread.

The AI Agent's "Talk with a human" button, shown beneath the chat input, only renders when Live Chat is enabled here. If a customer says the button is missing from the widget, whether it's the hosted snippet or a JS SDK embed, check this setting first before troubleshooting the embed itself.

If Live Chat is disabled, the same request still notifies your team and flags the thread as high priority in the inbox, but the customer stays in the AI chat interface rather than switching to a live chat view.

See the AI Agent article for how the Agent decides to hand off, and the Notifications article to control who gets paged.

Email fallback for unread messages

When a customer doesn't reply to a live chat message, Productlane emails them a copy two minutes after your team sends it. The timer runs on elapsed time, so a customer who opens the widget and reads the message without replying still gets the email.

Productlane skips it when:

• A newer message already went out on the thread

• The contact has no primary email address

• Your workspace email settings aren't configured

The email comes from your agent's first name at your workspace and uses the thread title as the subject. It carries the message plus the earlier conversation as a transcript, and threads with any prior emails on the same conversation.

Seen status and message channel

Live Chat shows a seen timestamp under the last message once your team has read it, so the customer knows a reply has been read.

Hover over that seen timestamp to see the channel a message was sent through, for example whether an agent's reply went out over email or live chat. This is currently the only way to check a message's channel; there is no persistent, always-visible label on each message.

Standalone, always-on read receipts and a permanent per-message channel indicator are not available today. If this matters for your workflow, let us know, we log these requests for product consideration.

Replying with a Help Center article

While replying in a Live Chat conversation, type @ in the composer to search your Help Center articles and insert one directly into the message. This lets an agent point a customer to the right doc without leaving the thread. See the Macros article for the rest of the Reply editor's shortcuts.

Seen timestamps and channel origin

Productlane shows a seen timestamp under a Live Chat message once the customer has opened the conversation, so your team knows the message was read without needing a separate read receipt.

Hover over that timestamp to see whether the message was sent by email or by Live Chat. This is the way to tell the two apart on a given message, since a thread can move between channels (for example, an AI Agent handoff keeps the same thread but switches the delivery channel).

Productlane does not have an explicit "seen" checkmark on individual messages, and there is no persistent badge that marks every message as email or chat at a glance. Both are logged feature requests, not on the current roadmap. If you need either, let your Productlane contact know so it can be tracked against demand.

Using Live Chat on mobile

There is no dedicated Productlane mobile app, but you can manage live chat conversations on the go in two ways:

• Mobile browser: Open productlane.com in your mobile browser and sign in. The site is accessible from mobile, so you can read and reply to live chat threads from your phone or tablet.

• Slack notifications: If you have the Slack integration enabled, you can receive live chat notifications in Slack and reply from the Slack mobile app. This is the recommended approach for staying responsive while away from your desk. See the Notifications article for setup details.