Activechat Manual
  • What is Activechat?
  • New? Start here
    • The basics
    • Set up your first project
    • Install the chat widget
    • Upload the knowledge
    • Explore the CRM
    • AI-assisted live chat
      • How to set context for AI hints
    • Live chat mobile app
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    • For Customer Service Teams
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  • Help Guides
    • Setting up your team
    • Managing conversations
      • Customer attributes
      • User tags and segments
      • Searching for specific users
      • Agent tags (live chat groups and queues)
      • Triggering live chat sessions from the bot
      • Notifications with the TRIGGER block
    • Managing knowledge
      • Uploading business data
      • Question answering and live chat hints
      • Fine-tuning the large language model
    • Natural language automation
    • Building automations visually
      • Customizing your welcome message
      • Adding new skills
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      • Copying skills and blocks
      • Handling errors
    • Improving your virtual agent
    • Using live chat AI hints
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    • Facebook Ads automation
      • How to set up a Facebook ads bot
      • How to use buttons and quick replies in a Facebook ads chatbot
    • Lead generation
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    • Customizing your project
      • How to customize the chat widget
      • How to customize the Facebook chat widget
      • How to change bot settings
    • Pricing guide
  • Fundamentals
    • Terminology
      • Intents and entities
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      • Skills and events
        • Built-in system skills
          • /start
          • /default
          • /_default_fallback
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          • /_page_visit
          • /_error
      • Conversation elements
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        • CREATE ORDER
    • Natural Language
      • NLP
    • System attributes
    • System events
  • Integrations
    • Google services
      • Connect your Google account
      • Google Sheets
        • Searching and updating Google Sheets data
        • Building galleries with Google Sheets data
      • Google Calendar
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    • Shopify
    • WooCommerce
    • Dialogflow
      • Building an agent
      • Using entities
      • Slot filling
      • Context management
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  1. Help Guides
  2. Managing conversations

Triggering live chat sessions from the bot

PreviousAgent tags (live chat groups and queues)NextNotifications with the TRIGGER block

Last updated 3 years ago

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We put conversation automation first. It means that any new visitors will start their conversations with your virtual assistant first, and the live chat can be accessed only if a specific conversation is escalated to one of your human agents.

To connect your customer to a live chat agent, use the block in the . The block settings are quite simple – it allows you to choose a specific agent or group to assign that chat to and defines the message that will be displayed to your customer while the agent is picking up the chat.

Triggering a live chat session from the virtual assistant skill

If the chat was not attended by a live agent, the “Error” exit from the “Live chat” block will be triggered after 180 seconds (default, can be changed in the block settings) so that you can still handle this situation automatically and not make your customer wait forever.

How to disable live chat during non-working hours and on weekends

This part of the manual requires some background with our .

Please refer to the '' section of the manual first.

Most live chat platforms offer quite limited customization options for situations when your agents are not available (on weekends or during non-working hours, for example). Activechat's advanced makes it extremely easy to build almost any scenario for these (and many others!) situations.

Below is a simple example of a customized skill that will disable live chat on weekends and between 6 pm .. 9 am, asking customers a series of questions instead.

Here's a brief overview of what's going on in this :

The block is triggered when the skill is started

The first block checks if it's Saturday or Sunday. If so, the first message is displayed, and then the custom '/support_afterhours' skill is triggered. The current day of the week is accessible as $_day (0 - Sunday, 1 - Monday, etc).

The second block checks if the current time is before 9 am or after 6 pm. If so, the second message is displayed, and again the '/support_afterhours' skill is triggered. The current time (in GMT) is accessible as $_hour system attribute.

If both SWITCH blocks conditions fail, the block is triggered to assign the current conversation to an agent. If the agent does not pick up the chat before the timeout, the "ERROR" node is triggered and two more messages are sent. After this, the same '/support_afterhours' skill is triggered.

The '/support_afterhours' is a simple custom-built that gets contact details and the issue description from the customer and then triggers a notification for live chat admin.

visual flow builder
Building automations visually
visual conversation builder
/_start_live_chat
skill
CATCH
SWITCH
system attribute
SWITCH
LIVE CHAT
lead generation skill
LIVE CHAT
conversation builder
Handling non-working hours scenario example