The operator inbox

Take waiting chats, answer several at once, move a chat to a colleague or ask one to help, and write private notes.

The Inbox has three parts: the lists on the left, the chat in the middle, and the visitor on the right (on a narrower screen, click the person icon to see the visitor).

Your status

At the top left: Online (chats come to you), Away (you stay signed in, no new chats) or Offline. Keep the Inbox open while you are online, or install the app on your phone: see Live Chat on your phone. If you close the Inbox for a while, you go offline by yourself after about a minute and a half.

The lists

Waiting: chats nobody has taken yet. "for you" means the chat was offered to you (see Routing); anyone may still take any waiting chat. A chat a chatbot is handling shows a robot.
Mine: your open chats, and chats you joined. A dot means the visitor wrote last.
Team (Admins and Supervisors): everyone else's open chats.
Ended: your chats of the last day, and messages left while nobody was online.

The tab title counts what is waiting, a sound plays for each new chat and message, and when the Inbox tab is in the background your computer shows a note.

Answering

Click a chat and type. Replying to a waiting chat takes it. Enter sends; Shift + Enter starts a new line.

Type : for canned replies, and / for commands.
Click the paper clip to send a picture or file (up to 10 MB).
Turn on Private note to write something only your team sees. Notes are yellow and are never shown to the visitor or sent in transcripts.
Under the messages you see what the visitor is typing before they send it (Standard and up).

Move (the arrows button): give the chat to a colleague. They get a note and the visitor sees "The chat was moved to ...".
Ask for help (the person-plus button): invite a colleague. They see an invitation at the top of their lists and join with Open > Join. Several people can write in one chat.
Supervisors can Join any open chat.
Leave a chat you joined with Leave.

Moving and sharing chats is on Standard and up.

Ending

Click End. The visitor can rate the chat and ask for a copy by email. A chat with no message from either side for 30 minutes ends by itself (change it under Settings > Preferences). A chat that ends with no reply from your team counts as missed.

The visitor panel

Name, email and phone (click Edit to fill them in), location with country flag, their local time, language and device, how many visits, pages and chats, where they came from, the pages they saw, and earlier chats. When you use other Ellibo apps, you also see their customer record, CRM lead, online orders, invoices and tickets, and buttons to make a lead or ticket, send your booking page or a payment link. See Live Chat with your other apps.