Messages

Two different things#

Both are configured at Websites → your site → Widget → Messages, and both become real messages in the thread. What separates them is when they are written, and whether they can reach a visitor who never asked for anything.

The greetingreactive · on by default

Shown to anyone who opens an empty chat. Costs nothing, interrupts nobody, and does not exist in your inbox until the visitor writes back.

The first-visit nudgeproactive · off by default

Appears on its own after a delay, to a first-time visitor who has not opened the widget. This is outreach. Off until you deliberately turn it on.

The greeting#

Enableddefault on

Off leaves a genuinely empty thread. Text that is only whitespace counts as off — you get no empty bubble.

Texttext, ≤ 1000 chars

Default: “Hi! 👋 Ask us anything — we usually reply within a few minutes.” Write the reply-time promise you can actually keep; it is the first thing a visitor measures you against.

Until the visitor sends something, the greeting is drawn from settings and stored nowhere. The moment they do send, it is written into the new conversation as its first message, ahead of theirs, and from then on it is in the thread, the inbox, and the transcript like any other message. The visitor sees the same bubble throughout — only what is behind it changes.

Editing the text changes it for future conversations only. Greetings already written into threads stay as they were sent, which is what a transcript is for.

The first-visit nudge#

Off by default. When on, a visitor on their first visit who has not opened the widget gets a preview card above the launcher after a delay you choose.

Enableddefault off

The master switch. Nothing below runs while this is off.

Texttext, ≤ 1000 chars

Default: “👋 Need a hand with anything?” Keep it short — the card clamps to two lines before it is opened.

Delay0–600 seconds · default 15

How long the visitor stays on the page before it fires. The clock restarts on every page load, so on a site where people browse quickly, a long delay means the nudge never fires at all.

Display duration0–300 seconds · default 10

How long the card stays up. 0 means it stays until the visitor dismisses or opens it — worth choosing, since a nudge that vanishes after ten seconds is a nudge nobody saw. Scoped to the nudge only; an agent’s reply is never re-timed by it.

Only when agents are onlinedefault on

Skips the nudge when nobody is available. Checked at the moment it fires, not at page load — the delay is minutes long and your team may have logged off in between. Inviting someone into an empty room is worse than staying quiet.

Preview or send#

The mode decides how far the nudge goes, and it is the most consequential choice here.

Preview — the default#

The card is drawn in the widget and that is all. No conversation, no message, no unread badge, nothing in the agent inbox. If the visitor writes back, a thread is created exactly as if they had opened the widget themselves.

Right for almost every site. Most visitors ignore a nudge, and recording one for each of them buries the real conversations under outreach nobody answered.

Send#

The nudge is written as a real message immediately. Your team sees that the site reached out whether or not the visitor answers, and any reply arrives with the nudge above it for context.

Right for deliberate, low-volume outreach — a pricing page, a checkout, a high-value demo request. Noisy on a busy site.

How “once” is enforced#

A visitor is nudged at most once, and the two modes guarantee that differently because only one of them writes anything down.

• Send mode is guarded on the server: a visitor with any conversation, in any state, is never nudged. Someone who chatted last month and had it resolved is not on their first visit. That holds across restarts, across devices sharing a token id, and no matter how often the widget asks.
• Preview mode writes nothing, so there is nothing to guard against. It relies on a flag in the visitor’s own browser storage plus the arming hint sent at boot. A visitor who clears their site data can earn a second preview — an acceptable trade for never touching the inbox.

Separately, “first visit” means within 30 minutes of Connect first seeing this visitor. The widget re-boots on every page load and the timer restarts with it, so browsing three pages before the nudge fires still qualifies.

Who they appear to be from#

Both are authored by the system and displayed under your team name, resolved when the message is read rather than stored on the message. Rename the team and every one of these renames itself, including in old transcripts.

They are deliberately not attributed to the AI — that would put an AI profile’s name on copy a human wrote — and not to any particular agent.