Offline chats and the two-minute rule

Live chat is only useful if somebody is there. EspressoDesk handles the gap for you.

If no agent replies to a new chat within two minutes, the conversation is marked as an offline ticket. The visitor is told that the team will follow up by email, and the ticket stays in your inbox like any other so you can answer it later.

When a chat is closed, the visitor sees that the session ended and gets a button to start a new one instead of typing into a dead conversation.

If the AI chatbot is enabled on your plan, it answers first from your published articles, which keeps most visitors served even outside office hours.

What the visitor sees

While the two minutes run, the chat stays open and the visitor can keep typing; everything they write is kept. When the conversation becomes an offline ticket, the widget explains that the team will answer by e-mail and asks for an address if the visitor has not given one yet.

What you see in the inbox

The conversation appears as a normal ticket on the live chat channel, with the full transcript as the first message. Reply to it like any e-mail ticket: your answer reaches the customer by e-mail and their response comes back into the same thread.

Good to know

• Set expectations in the welcome message. Saying when the team is online prevents most disappointed visitors.
• Publish your opening hours in the knowledge base, and let the chatbot answer the routine questions when the office is closed.
• Nothing is ever lost: even an abandoned chat with no reply stays in your inbox as a ticket you can follow up.