How to continue conversations through email?

Your customers can continue their chat conversations with your agents through 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 in the Chatwoot CRM.

Obtaining email addresses of contacts​

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

1. From Chatwoot SDK​

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

2. From pre-chat form​

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

3. From 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.

Conversation Continuity​

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

If the customer's email address is updated through any of the options mentioned above and they leave the chat while the agent has replied, the following happens.

• 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.

The email icon in the chat bubble indicates that the customer has replied through email.