The Helpdesky widget gives visitors two ways to reach your inbox from its Message tab: live chat and tickets. With live chat, the visitor types straight into a chat box, no email or account required, and waits for your reply inside the widget. With a ticket, the visitor leaves an email address and a message, and your reply arrives in their inbox. This guide explains how live chat vs ticket messaging in the widget works, when to offer each, what happens when nobody on your team is online, how much of your availability visitors get to see, and how to switch between them.
Both modes land in the same place. Live chats and tickets both arrive in your Messages inbox, count toward the same conversation limits, and use the same reply tools. The only difference is what the visitor sees and how the reply reaches them.
How the two modes differ
Live chat is built for visitors who want an answer while they are still on the page. The chat box opens immediately, they send a message without filling in anything else, and your reply appears in the widget in real time. A short note at the top of the chat, such as "We usually reply within a few minutes", tells them how long to wait.
Ticket is the classic form: email, optional name, and message. It suits visitors who do not want to sit and wait, and it guarantees you always have a way to follow up. Nothing changes here compared to the existing widget messaging flow described in the Widget Messaging Setup Guide.
| Live chat | Ticket | |
|---|---|---|
| Email required to start | No | Yes |
| Where the reply shows up | Inside the widget, instantly | By email (and in the widget on their next visit) |
| When nobody is online | Falls back to the ticket form by default, or stays open if you keep live chat available | Always available |
| Best for | Quick questions while browsing | Detailed requests, visitors who will leave the page |
| Inbox channel label | Live chat | Widget |
Choosing a messaging mode
Open Embeds > Widget in your dashboard and find the Messaging section. The Messaging mode setting has three options:
- Ticket only. The default. Visitors see the email and message form, exactly as before.
- Live chat only. The chat box opens straight away while someone on your team is online. Visitors can still leave an email later, but they never have to.
- Let the visitor choose. The Message tab opens with two cards, Live chat ("Chat with us now and wait here for the reply") and Leave a ticket ("Send us a message and we reply by email"). The visitor picks whichever fits.
When you pick live chat or the visitor choice, five more settings appear in the same Live chat block:
- Live chat reply time note. The short line at the top of every live chat. The default text is "We usually reply within a few minutes". Change it under Embeds > Widget > Messaging > Live chat reply time note so it matches how fast you actually respond.
- Offline message. Shown when none of your operators are online: at the top of the ticket form, or inside the live chat if you keep it available. The default is "We're offline right now. Leave a message and we'll reply by email."
- Show visitors when an operator is typing. On by default. See the Typing indicators section further down.
- Show operator availability in the widget. On by default. Controls the green Online now badge and the offline message inside an open live chat. Turn it off to keep your availability private. See Choosing how much availability visitors see below.
- When no operator is online. Choose Switch to the ticket form (the default) or Keep live chat available. See What visitors see when nobody is online below.
Save your changes and the widget preview on the right updates to show the new flow. The preview has its own Preview as: Online / Offline switch, so you can check both versions of the Message tab without waiting for your team to log out. The offline preview follows both of the new settings, so what you see there is what visitors get.
Tip: You do not have to switch modes at the end of the day. By default, when nobody is online the widget falls back to the ticket form on its own, in both live chat modes. Pick the mode that matches your busiest hours, and only change When no operator is online if you are happy for chats to wait until someone is back.
Online status and the offline fallback
Live chat works best when someone can answer. Helpdesky tracks that automatically, and by default the widget never invites a visitor to wait for a reply that is not coming. Two settings let you change how much of this visitors see and what happens while you are away.
How Helpdesky decides you are online
You count as online while you have the dashboard open in a browser tab and have not set yourself to Away. The dashboard checks in quietly in the background every half minute or so. Close your last dashboard tab, or put the computer to sleep, and you drop offline within about two minutes. There is nothing to click when you leave, and no separate app to keep running.
Your helpdesk is online when at least one active operator is online. This includes the owner and any teammate you have added on the Team page. If you own several helpdesks, being online counts for all of them at once.
Setting yourself to Away
Sometimes the dashboard is open but you are not really available, for example during a meeting or while you work through a backlog. Click your avatar in the top right corner of the dashboard. The menu shows your current status, a green dot for Online or a grey dot for Away, next to an Away switch.
- Turn Away on and the widget stops counting you straight away. If you were the only operator online, visitors see the offline version of the Message tab on their next check.
- The setting follows your account, not your browser. Switch it on at your desk and you stay Away on your laptop and phone too, until you switch it off.
- Away does not affect anything else in the dashboard. You can keep reading and replying to conversations as normal.
What visitors see when nobody is online
The widget checks your status when the Message tab opens, again every so often while it stays open, and (with the default setting) one last time right before a chat starts. That means a status change during a visit is picked up without the visitor reloading the page.
What happens next depends on the When no operator is online setting under Embeds > Widget > Messaging.
Switch to the ticket form (the default):
- Live chat only. Instead of the chat box, the visitor sees the ticket form with your Offline message at the top. Email is required, so you always have a way to reply. Anything they had already typed into the chat box is carried over into the form.
- Let the visitor choose. The Live chat card is greyed out with a short "Offline – leave a ticket" hint and cannot be selected. Leave a ticket is the only option, and the form shows your offline message.
- Already in a chat. If everyone goes offline while a visitor is mid conversation, the reply time note at the top swaps to your offline message and the optional email field comes back, even if they had dismissed it earlier, with a nudge to leave an address so the reply can reach them. When someone comes back online, the note switches back.
Keep live chat available:
- Your online status no longer changes what the visitor is offered. Live chat only opens the chat box as usual, and in Let the visitor choose the Live chat card stays enabled with its normal description. There is no last minute check before the chat starts, and a visitor already in a chat is never moved to the ticket form.
- The visitor can send a message and the conversation arrives in your inbox as a live chat. They see your reply in the widget when they come back to the page, or by email if they left an address.
- With Show operator availability on, the chat shows your Offline message in place of the reply time note while nobody is online, on the start screen and inside open conversations, and swaps back as soon as someone returns. The optional email field also comes back with its nudge, even if the visitor had dismissed it, because email is the only way a reply can reach someone who leaves the page. They can dismiss it again.
- With Show operator availability off, the visitor simply sees a normal live chat with the reply time note. Nothing hints at whether anyone is there.
This option suits teams that check the inbox in bursts and would rather collect chats than push visitors to a form. The reply time note is doing more work in that case, so make sure it sets an honest expectation.
Tickets left while you were offline arrive in your inbox like any other ticket, with the usual email notification to the visitor when you reply.
Choosing how much availability visitors see
While someone is online, the Message tab shows a small green Online now badge next to the "How would you like to reach us?" heading and in the header of the screen where a new chat starts, so visitors know it is worth waiting. Some teams would rather not broadcast this. Turn off Show operator availability in the widget under Embeds > Widget > Messaging and:
- The Online now badge never appears anywhere in the widget.
- An open live chat keeps its reply time note when everyone goes offline. The offline message is not swapped in and the dismissed email field stays dismissed.
One thing this switch does not change: when live chat falls back to the ticket form because nobody is online, the ticket form still opens with your Offline message at the top. That message is there to explain why the visitor is looking at a form instead of a chat, so it always shows in that situation. If you want no trace of your availability at all, combine the switch with Keep live chat available.
What visitors see in live chat
When a visitor opens live chat, the reply time note sits at the top of the conversation and the composer is ready to type into. Above the composer is a small, dismissible email field with a short explanation: leaving an email means they can close the chat and get your reply by email instead of waiting.
- If they skip the email, the conversation stays inside the widget. They can close and reopen it on the same browser and land back in the open chat.
- If they add an email at any point, the field disappears and the conversation behaves like a normal one. Your replies go out by email using the usual notification timing.
- If they dismiss the field, it stays hidden on that browser so it does not nag them on every visit. The one exception is when your team goes offline mid chat while availability is shown, as described above.
Live chat conversations rely on the browser to remember the visitor, the same way widget messaging always has. If the visitor clears their browser data or switches devices without leaving an email, they cannot find the old chat again. That is one more reason the optional email field is worth keeping visible.
Typing indicators
Live chat feels a lot less like shouting into the void when each side can see the other is writing.
- Visitors see you typing. While you write in the reply composer for a live chat, the visitor sees an animated "typing…" bubble at the bottom of the thread. It disappears a few seconds after you stop, or the moment your reply lands.
- You see visitors typing. When the visitor is writing in the widget, the open conversation in your Messages inbox shows "Visitor is typing…" so you know a follow up is on the way before you close the conversation.
Typing signals are sent live between the widget and the inbox and are never stored. They do not appear in the conversation history, the contact record, or any export.
If you would rather not reveal when an operator is writing, open Embeds > Widget, find the Messaging section, and turn off Show visitors when an operator is typing. Visitors then never receive the indicator, while you still see when they are typing. The setting applies to the whole helpdesk, not to individual operators.
What you see in the inbox
Live chat conversations carry a Live chat channel label in the inbox list and in the conversation details panel, so you can tell at a glance which visitors are waiting on the page.
A visitor who has not left an email appears as Anonymous visitor wherever contact details normally show: the conversation header, the contact panel, the Contacts page, and the CSV export. Helpdesky does not attempt to send reply emails to anonymous visitors, so you will not see failed deliveries for them. The moment the visitor adds an email, the placeholder disappears and their real address takes its place.
If the email they enter already belongs to an existing contact in your helpdesk, the chat is attached to that contact instead of creating a duplicate. Their earlier conversations and any notes you kept stay in one place.
Replying to a live chat
Reply from the Messages inbox exactly as you would for any other conversation. The visitor sees your message appear in the widget without refreshing. If they have added an email, the standard delayed notification still goes out unless they read the reply first, and you can use Send instantly when the message is urgent.
Because the whole point of live chat is speed, it helps to keep the inbox open in a browser tab while your team is available. That same open tab is what keeps you online for the widget, so visitors are offered the chat exactly when you can take it.
Troubleshooting
The visitor sees the ticket form even though live chat is enabled. First check your own status: click your avatar in the dashboard and make sure it says Online rather than Away. If nobody on the team has a dashboard tab open, the widget falls back to the ticket form by default. If you would rather it did not, set When no operator is online to Keep live chat available. Otherwise, the widget script caches its configuration briefly. Reload the page once, and check that the mode was saved by looking at the widget preview in Embeds > Widget.
I am online but the widget still says offline. The widget refreshes your status periodically, so give it up to a minute. Also make sure the dashboard tab is actually visible on screen. Browsers pause background tabs, and the presence check pauses with them until you come back.
Visitors can start a live chat while we are offline. Check When no operator is online under Embeds > Widget > Messaging. If it is set to Keep live chat available, that is the intended behaviour. Switch it to Switch to the ticket form to go back to the offline fallback.
The Online now badge is missing even though I am online. Make sure Show operator availability in the widget is switched on. When it is off the badge is hidden on purpose, for every operator.
I turned availability off but visitors still see the offline message on the ticket form. That is expected. The offline message on the ticket form explains why the form replaced the chat and is not controlled by the availability switch. Use Keep live chat available if you do not want the fallback at all.
Live chat option is missing from the Message tab. Make sure messaging is turned on for your helpdesk, that Show messaging in widget is switched on, and that the mode is set to live chat or visitor choice. Live chat is also enforced on the server, so a helpdesk set to ticket only never accepts a conversation without an email, even from an old copy of the widget.
Visitors say they cannot see me typing. Check that Show visitors when an operator is typing is switched on in Embeds > Widget. The indicator only reaches visitors who have that conversation open in the widget at that moment, and it is never sent while you are writing a private note.
A contact shows as Anonymous visitor in the Contacts page. This is a live chat visitor who has not shared an email. You can still read and reply to their conversation in the widget. If they later provide an email, the entry updates automatically. You can also set an email for them yourself from the contact panel if they gave it to you in the chat.
Next steps
Pick the mode that matches how your team works, set an offline message in your own voice, then open your own site and try the Message tab as a visitor, once with the dashboard open and once with yourself set to Away. If you have not embedded the widget yet, start with Adding the Widget to Your Site, and if you want to lock the widget to your own domains, see Restrict Embeds to Specific Domains.