The support desk

The support desk is a chat on every public page — for a guest and a signed-in person alike — and an inbox for the staff. It is kept entirely apart from the coaching chat: its own conversations, its own words, its own people. A support agent never sees a coaching thread, and a coach's inbox never fills with returns. Module: support.

A voice note — a contact's or an agent's — arrives with a transcript under it, written down by whichever browser recorded it, so the desk can read a thread without playing it.

What somebody sees

A launcher in the corner of every public page (never on the admin, never in a video call — its bar sits where the launcher would — and never for the staff). Where a page docks a bar along the bottom — the community's, on a phone — the launcher rides above it (the page sets --pk-dock to the bar's height). It opens a panel: the person's conversations, one open thread, or the start of a new one. A thread takes text, a voice note, or one file per message (a picture, shown inline; a PDF or text file as a chip; 10 MB). The other side is the site's mark until a person has answered, then that person's initials and name.

Identity is the account. A guest types no name and no email into the chat: a typed claim is not an identity, and nothing real may hang off one. A guest is anonymous and remembered by a token in their browser; the panel offers the site's own sign-in to be reachable. Somebody's name and address come from their profile, and the panel offers the confirmation link again to an address that has not answered it. When a guest signs in or up, their conversations move onto the account.

Once per thread, after the person's first real line, a system line says the message is in and a person will answer when they can.

Messages and tickets are two tabs, not one feed. A conversation is something the person is having; a ticket is something somebody owes them, and a ticket can outlive the chat it came out of by weeks. So the panel's list has a tab each: their tickets with the state of each in words, one ticket with its timeline and a reply box at the foot, and Report a problem for opening one themselves (capped, like everything else a guest may do). What they see of a ticket is the public timeline — what was written to them and what changed — and never the desk's own notes; that filter is applied in the query, not by hiding rows in the page.

The inbox

Community → Support — in the editing admin and on the live site alike, the one rail; a support agent's rail holds Support and Notifications and nothing else. The staff are accounts with the admin or the support role.

• Filters: status (open · pending · resolved), who (guest · reader · customer — a customer is an account with a paid purchase or a live membership), whose (mine · unassigned · all), unread. Sort by longest waiting or by activity.
• A thread: the conversation, the contact's card (kind, last seen, last page, orders, and what a page set on the contact through $chatwidget or the Client API as key: value lines), a private note on the contact that only the staff see, the reply box with canned replies above it (edited under UI strings → support, ## canned), a voice recorder, a file clip. Typing shows both ways.
• Actions: assign to me, pending, resolve, reopen; Export a transcript; Delete a thread (its files first, then the thread). A line may be withdrawn by whoever wrote it; the bubble stays as a placeholder.
• A contact's line on a resolved thread reopens it.

The inbox follows the tables live: a new line lands without a reload, and with Alert me on (the browser's own permission, remembered per browser) a contact's line that arrives while the tab is hidden or another thread is open raises a notification and a short tone.

Who is told, and how

The staff are never emailed per message. They are told in the inbox, by the browser alert, and — with the push module on — by a web push notification on a new conversation or a new line.

Email is an escalation only: every five minutes the platform looks for threads that are open, unanswered for longer than the policy's support wait (minutes), while no agent has been in the inbox within the presence window, and sends one digest per recipient listing every thread due — the assignee's own to the assignee, the rest to the support address (else every staff address). Only a contact who can be answered by email (a confirmed account) counts; a guest never costs the staff an email. A thread is escalated once. The two clocks are in the emails policy file; the admin's policy panel edits the email counts and leaves the clocks as they are.

The contact is emailed about a reply they were not there to see — nothing while they were on the site in the last two minutes, one per unread burst — with a link that opens the panel on the thread. Never a guest, never an unconfirmed address.

Prompts: conversations that start themselves

A chat prompt is a step of a funnel whose channel is chat: a line the browser shows as a card above the launcher when its triggers hold — so many seconds on the site, on such a page, so long on it, signed in or not, returning, with something in the cart. Nothing is sent; nothing is a thread until the person replies. A prompt may carry a picture (a gif — shown on the card above the launcher on a wide screen, and on a phone only once the panel is open, where it would otherwise fill the screen) and may end with choices — buttons the person picks from, which may nest into follow-ups up to three deep. A prompt is shown once, ever, per person; a thread per prompt per contact is unique. Prompts and the launcher use the same mayInterrupt() guard as ads: it blocks reserved work areas plus the site's configured feed, spaces and people routes. If the route changes or becomes ineligible while a prompt or default nudge is being resolved, the result is discarded before it can claim the corner.

One prompt is the desk's default (when: default): not a trigger but the line the panel rests on at the top of every new conversation. It nudges once per visit with its short teaser line a few seconds after arrival, until the panel is opened or the card put away. Somebody may start as many threads on it as they like.

A choice may point somewhere. An arrow at the end of one takes the person to a form or a page, and the choice is still recorded like any other:

- My item has not arrived yet.
- Something is not working -> form:report
- Read the refunds policy -> /content/docs/refunds

That is the whole of what a desk with no language model needs: a prompt somebody wrote by hand that still collects the four things nobody wants to ask one at a time over three days — see a form that raises a ticket.

And a bot may offer them too, in the same words. An assistant's answer whose last lines are a list ends in the same buttons — arrows and all — in the widget, in a room, and on a forum post. What somebody presses is sent as their own next words, so the thread reads as a conversation rather than a form being filled in, and the bot is asked again with it. Only the last offer can be taken, and only once: an older set stays under its answer, faded, with the one that was taken marked. They go the moment somebody asks for a person. See what a bot may put in an answer.

Prompts are edited in Marketing → Funnels as steps of a funnel, with the triggers as rows (a kind from a list and a control per kind), the choices as a tree, and the teaser as its own field; the funnel's audience is the prompt's (no rules: everyone; rules: matching signed-in people, never a guest). See Funnels and blasts.

Numbers

The prompts' numbers are on the page of the funnel each belongs to, Marketing → Funnels → Performance (a chat step among the funnel's steps, or a funnel of prompts alone): shown, picked, threads begun, people, and every choice by how often it was picked — named by its line, even one since taken down, since the event carries the words. Nothing of the chat is on Content analytics.

Guards and housekeeping

The anonymous door is rate-limited per address and hour (new guests, new threads, uploads). A nightly job removes files older than the policy's keep files days; the messages stay, their files gone. Under lockdown mode (a developer's switch) a sign-in from the chat is refused and a guest stays a guest.

Words

UI strings → support (the widget, the panel, the inbox, the canned replies, the panel's own page at /support); the system lines the functions send (the acknowledgement, the digest's subject) under emails → ## support.