Creating an Offline Email Card

Chat widgets configs contain one or more "cards". A card can show multiple action buttons, which may start a chat, or trigger an email and accompanying text, images or video. You can configure the visibility of a card to show based on certain conditions, the most common one being queue availability.

If the queue is offline, you might like to still offer the customer a way to contact you via email instead. This can be configured by creating a card, which has the action of sending an email, which will be displayed when the queue of offline.

Firstly, you must load a config which is in draft mode. If you do not have a draft config, you can create one by clicking "Create Draft".

As a widget can have multiple configs, you will need to configure a card for each config where you want the offline mode to appear. Select "edit on the appropriate card widget and then navigate to the Standby Phase tab.

Select "Add Standby Card..." and then choose a card template, you may choose a basic card, a card with image or a card with video. For this example, we will use a basic card.

Your new card will be visible in the list of cards. Click the square to the right to expand the card to view its details.

You can rename the standby card to something more appropriate for easier identification in the future. And then you may choose a rule type for visibility. 

For this example, we want to choose Queue Status. From here, you can choose the queue you wish to check the status of, and choose the visibility rule:

Choose the correct queue in the left dropdown, and change the middle dropdown to NOT and then leave the dropdown to the right as Online. You can configure these cards to use different rules depending upon your needs. You may wish to have a different form depending on the status of the queue, or even deflect the chats when you are out of business hours to a different queue. 

Once complete, click the "Edit Card" button above. Which will take you to the card editor with the new card selected. Please note, make sure you check which card you are editing. Some configs have many cards, so double check you are editing the correct card.

Now click on the "Button - Start Chat" tab:

Change the action name to something more appropriate, in tihs case, it would be "Button - Send Email" and then open the dropdown for the Action Type:

Change the action type to "Send an email to a queue", and then select the correct target queue in the next dropdown. Please note, you must have an email address configured for the queue, otherwise the queue will not appear in the list.

Finally, choose a data collection form. The data collection forms can be defined in the "Data Collection" tab on the left-hand side of the screen. For further information, please review the data collection help article.

Once complete, click on the Text CTA section from the list of cards on the left-hand side:

Update the text to be something appropriate to explain there are no agents available, and that the customer can email instead.

Once complete, click the save button to the top of the page, and then repeat this process with any other configs as necessary. Once complete, you can publish the configuration to make the changes live on your website.