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Live chat & the inbox

Chat with visitors in real time and manage every conversation from one shared inbox.

NudgeVisor lets you chat with visitors in real time and handle every conversation from a single, shared inbox. Whether someone reaches out from your site or you start a conversation after spotting them in the live view, every message lands in the same place for your team to pick up.

The unified inbox

All conversations across your sites flow into one unified inbox that your whole team can work from. There is no per-agent silo — anyone with access can see open conversations, jump in, and hand over without anything falling through the cracks. The chat experience your visitors see is built into the NudgeVisor widget, so once that is installed there is nothing extra to add. See Installing the widget if you have not set it up yet.

Replying and canned responses

Reply to a visitor straight from the inbox and your message appears in their chat widget instantly. To move faster on the questions you answer over and over, use canned responses — saved replies you can drop into a conversation in a couple of clicks instead of retyping the same answer each time.

Opening chat programmatically

You can trigger the chat panel from your own code — for example, from a "Chat with us" button or after a visitor completes a particular step. Call openChat() to open the conversation for the current visitor:

// Open the chat panel for the current visitor:
NudgeVisor.openChat();

You can also listen for chat activity in the browser. Subscribe to chatStarted to know when a visitor opens a conversation, and to message to react to each new message:

// React to the conversation as it happens:
NudgeVisor.on('chatStarted', function () {
  console.log('The visitor opened a conversation.');
});

NudgeVisor.on('message', function (message) {
  console.log('New message:', message);
});

For the complete list of events and their payloads, see the Widget events reference.

Routing to departments & internal notes

Conversations can be routed to departments and teams so the right people pick up the right questions — sales enquiries to one team, support to another. Behind the scenes, your team can leave internal notes on a conversation to collaborate without the visitor ever seeing them. See Teams & notes for how to organise your team and use notes effectively.

Who you're talking to

When a visitor has been identified, their conversation shows a real name and email instead of "Anonymous visitor", so your team always knows who they are speaking with and can see the context of who is on the other end. To attach an identity to a visitor, see Identifying visitors.

Starting chats from the live view & nudges

You don't have to wait for visitors to reach out first. From live visitor monitoring you can start a chat with someone you can see browsing right now. You can also let automation do the inviting: a proactive nudge can invite a visitor to chat at just the right moment, and any reply they send arrives back in the unified inbox.

Next steps