Knowledge base
Live chat: answering your own website's visitors
Where your visitors' conversations arrive, how to answer them, and what happens when nobody is there.
Live chat puts a chat window on your website. Your visitors type into it, you answer from here, and anything nobody picks up is emailed to you with the whole conversation. It is not our support chat — the person at the other end is your visitor, not ours, and they have no Zinn Digital® account.
Where conversations arrive
Live chat → Conversations. Everything live is in the list, newest activity first, with a preview of what the visitor actually said so you can see who needs you without opening anything. A conversation waiting for a person is highlighted and counted at the top.
Pick one to read it and answer. The moment you reply, the conversation is yours — the assistant stops answering that visitor, so you are never talking over each other.
Who answers first
If you have the assistant switched on, it answers straight away from what it knows about your site. It hands the conversation to you when it cannot answer, and immediately — without trying — if the visitor asks for a person, or the question is about an order, money or a complaint. Those are the ones you want.
When nobody is there
After five minutes with nobody answering, we email the conversation to the address you set under Live chat → Settings, with everything said so far. The visitor's message is saved the moment they send it, whether or not anyone is online, so nothing is ever lost.
Set your opening hours in the same place and the widget tells visitors when you are closed rather than leaving them waiting.
Switching it on
Your chat starts switched off, and nothing appears on your site until you turn it on. You need two things: the web address your site is on (the chat only answers pages you have listed, which is what stops anyone else using your chat on their site), and either the key pasted into the Zinn® Chat WordPress plugin or the one-line snippet on any other site. Both are on the Settings tab.
What it costs your visitors
Under 7 KB, and no requests at all until somebody opens it. A visitor who never clicks the chat downloads one small cached file and nothing else.
Still stuck?
Support is included on every plan and answers in your own language.
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