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Conversation Continuity through Email

Your customers can continue their chat conversations with your agents via email threads. This may be required under the following circumstances.

  • No agents are available and the customer leaves a message in the chat.
  • The customer leaves the chat before the agent replies.

For this to work, the contact should have an email address associated with it in the Chatwoot CRM.

Obtaining email address of contacts

You can prompt/update customer emails into chatwoot through the following ways.

1.via Chatwoot SDK

If customer email is already known, you can supply it into chatwoot via the setUser method in our SDK

2.via PreChat Form

If you enable a mandatory pre-chat form, the conversation starts with a screen as shown below:

chatwoot-prechat-form

You can find more details about configuring pre-chat form in this guide.

3.via Email Collect Prompt

When the pre-chat form is disabled and the customer's email is unknown, Chatwoot starts a conversation with an email collect prompt.

chatwoot-email-collect

Conversation Continuity

Note: Enable conversation continuity in self-hosted installations with the help of this guide

As a result, if the customer's email address is updated through any of the options mentioned above and they leave the chat while their agent has replied, the following will occur:

  • The customer receives an email thread with a conversation summary. They can reply to that email and continue the conversation.
  • The agent receives the customer replies from email in their Chatwoot dashboard, continued over the existing conversation thread.
chatwoot-dashboard-email-reply

The email icon in the chat bubble indicates that the customer reply arrived via email.