Everything here is under Sohay → Settings → Widget Settings.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Human handoff | The master switch. Off by default. |
| When your team is available | Any time, or a weekly schedule. |
| Message when nobody is available | What a visitor is told outside your hours. |
| Notify these addresses | Who gets the email. |
| Give up waiting after | Minutes before the assistant takes over again. Default 10. |
| Then wait | Minutes before that conversation may ask again. Default 15. |
The schedule
Times are your site’s, not the visitor’s. “9 to 5” describes when your team is at their desks; somebody browsing from another timezone does not change that. The site timezone is whatever is set under Settings → General — worth checking, because a lot of sites never set it.
A closing time earlier than the opening time runs past midnight into the next
day, so a late shift is written as 22:00–02:00 on the day it starts.
Outside your hours the widget stops offering to fetch anybody. A visitor who asks anyway — an old browser tab, say — gets your offline message rather than a promise you cannot keep. Write that message properly: it is the one your visitors are most likely to see.
Who gets the email
Notify these addresses takes the addresses you want told. Leave it empty and it falls back to the conversation’s assignee, and then to the site admin.
One email per conversation, and none at all if somebody has already picked the conversation up by the time it would send.
Give up waiting after
How long a visitor waits before the assistant takes the conversation back and tells them nobody was available. Ten minutes by default.
Set it to roughly how long you would actually take to notice. Too long and somebody sits there; too short and you lose conversations you would have got to. The visitor is never left in silence either way — the assistant is still answering the whole time.
Then wait
The cooldown, and the one setting whose purpose is not obvious.
The assistant asks for a person whenever it is stuck. A conversation it keeps
being stuck on would page your team over and over. So after a request lapses
unanswered, that conversation waits before it can ask again. Fifteen minutes
by default; 0 allows asking again immediately.
It applies only when nobody came. A request you answered, or one the visitor withdrew, leaves no cooldown behind.
Who can take a conversation over
Anyone with the reply to conversations capability. No separate role to grant — if somebody can already answer in the inbox, they can take over.
Where to go next
Before you switch handoff on covers the two decisions worth making first, and Knowing when somebody is waiting covers how you find out.
