A
Access Token
Application APIs are designed to interact with a Chatwoot account from a user's perspective. So, to integrate apps and authenticate to these APIs, you will require a user access_token, which can be obtained from your Profile Settings.
Administrator (Admin)
Administrators are such account users who have complete access to all the enabled features. They can also control all the account settings, unlike agents.
Agent
An Agent is anyone from your team who can answer customer conversations. An agent has lesser account permissions as compared to the administrator.
Agent Status
An agent can set themself as Online , Busy , Offline through their Profile Settings.
API
The APIs (Application Programming Interface) in Chatwoot enable you to connect more external systems than the UI offers. See the types of APIs in Chatwoot.
Applications
These are external apps that are natively integrated with Chatwoot. Setting these up lets you enhance your customer engagement toolset. E.g. You can build a chatbot using our native integration with the Dialogflow app.
Archived articles (Help Center)
Archived articles are the ones you don’t want to be published. They will stay as drafts within your dashboard.
Article (Help Center)
An article is a document created in the Help Center portal under the topic category that holds essential information about an aspect of a product. These articles can be shared in customer conversations.
Assignee
A person on your team who is assigned a conversation––usually assumes its responsibility and sends answers to it.
Audio notifications
On dashboard, Chatwoot alerts you of new events (like new messages and conversations) by playing an alert tone. You can customize your preferences in the Profile Settings.
Author (Article)
An author of a Help Center article can be chosen from the Agents list. Their name and thumbnail appear on the published article page.
Automation
It is a set of rules an Admin defines for the account to automate specific tasks. Examples of such tasks include assigning agents or teams, adding labels, snoozing conversations, etc. These actions are triggered based on events and conditions defined by you.
Learn more about the associated features.
B
Bots
You can create bots to automate some standard parts of a conversation, such as greeting a customer when she first messages.
Business Hours
You can set the working hours for any channel/inbox within Chatwoot. So, whenever your agents associated with the particular inbox are outside their working hours, Chatwoot will show a custom message to the customer.
C
Campaigns
Campaigns let you create outbound messages for your customers and web visitors. Campaigns are of two types:
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Ongoing: For sending outbound messages in website live chat based on conditions, like: if a user visited the Pricing page and stayed for 3 minutes, send a message offering advice.
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One-off: For sending an SMS campaign to a group of contacts.
Canned Responses
These are your saved reply templates to send out a reply to a conversation quickly by using a shortcode.
Categories (Help Center)
You can divide a Help Center portal into categories and write specific articles under each of such categories. These categories appear as sections (in a grid layout) when your Help Center is live.
Channel/Inbox
A channel is a mode of communication your customer selects to talk to you. An inbox is an instance of a channel. For eg. Email, web live chat, social interactions, etc., qualify as inboxes.
Contacts
The contacts on your account store information on the people who have ever messaged you + any list you upload manually.
Contact Segments
A saved filter group for your contacts. Learn more.
Conversations
Your chats with various customers are referred to as conversations in Chatwoot.
CSAT
CSAT, short for Customer Satisfaction, is feedback your customers provide based on their satisfaction with your support team. It is usually a rating system (along with optional textual feedback).
These ratings can be averaged out for certain periods to find the “CSAT score” for your team. You can track your CSAT scores under the CSAT Reports section on your dashboard.
Also, learn about crucial customer service KPIs.
Custom Attributes
These help you track custom info/facts about conversations and/or contacts. These are different from standard facts. For e.g., Standard facts are name, email, location, etc. Custom Attributes are subscription plan, signup date, most ordered item, etc.
D
Dashboard
The primary area of work displaying all the vital information and features to work with and interact on conversations.
Dashboard Apps
A dashboard app in an external application brought onto your dashboard for quick access to customer data. For, e.g., If you have a customers’ orders tracking app and want to embed the same on your dashboard, set it up with the help of this feature.
Also read: How to use Dashboard Apps?
Draft Article (Help Center)
An Article that is a work-in-progress but not published is known as a Draft Article.
Draft Reply
If you're composing a reply or sending a private note to a teammate and leave the screen or even refresh the page––your text will be right where you left it. Chatwoot shall save the data and preserve your unsent messages as drafts. This is known as draft replies.
E
Email Notifications
Chatwoot sends you an email whenever a particular activity occurs in your account, like a new conversation being created, a new conversation being assigned to you, etc. You can personalize your email notifications preferences from your Profile Settings.
F
First Response Time
A metric (also used in reports) that calculates the total time taken to send the first reply to a customer’s message by a particular agent, team or particular inbox.
Folder (conversation)
When you group your conversations with the help of filters, you can also save them as custom folders. Once saved, such folders appear on the left sidebar of your dashboard for quick access.
Forward to Email
When you set up an Email channel, it needs your incoming support emails to your primary inbox (such as Gmail) to be forwarded to Chatwoot. This is achieved with the help of the Forward to Email setting, which is found under the Email channel settings.
H
Help Center
You can create and manage a complete customer-facing portal from your dashboard. Primarily, you can manage your knowledge base and product articles from this portal and use these articles directly in your conversations.
E.g., This glossary has been created using the Help Center.
I
IMAP
IMAP (Internet Messaging Access Protocol) allows you to read your email messages from your email inbox. Enable this option from the Email channel settings.
Import (contacts)
You can manually add contacts to your contacts list on Chatwoot by uploading a CSV file. You can include standard as well as custom contact details in your CSV file.
Incoming messages
Any new message sent by a customer in an incoming message.
Integrations
Chatwoot has a suite of natively integrated apps that work seamlessly with Chatwoot and enhance your overall experience. For, e.g. You can integrate with Slack to manage your conversations from there!
K
Knowledge Base
This is a set of product articles and documentation created to help out your customers. You can manage your knowledge base with the Help Center from your dashboard.
L
Labels
It is like a digital sticker to put on your conversations and categorize them. Labels are created on the account level and can be used across. Examples of labels include bug-report, new-customer, spam, feature request, etc.
Live chat
Live chat customer support is a way for customers to interact with the customer support team in real time. Customers can ask queries and get prompt answers on the chat screen itself by using the live chat option integrated into a company's website or app.
Helpful: The complete guide to providing live chat customer support
M
Macro
A macro is a set of sequential saved actions, like labelling a conversation, sending an email transcript, sending an attachment, etc., which you can define from your Chatwoot Settings. You can also make a personal macro or one available for your team's use. You can run a macro from a chat sidebar.
Markdown
Chatwoot uses markdown language in its messages and Help Center articles.
(@) Mentions
You can tag a fellow teammate on private notes to notify them about a matter you want to discuss.
You can also view (only) the conversations that mention you by using the “Mentions” view on the dashboard.
Metadata (Help Center articles)
You can write a Meta title, description and tags for your Help Center articles to be displayed in the search results of a search engine. All metadata can be managed from the article’s sidebar.
Metrics
Metrics are objective numbers/goals or KPIs you can track about your support team. For e.g., CSAT score, First Reply Time, Response rate, etc., qualify as metrics.
You can track many metrics regarding the performance of your conversations, agents, teams, etc., using the Reports section on your dashboard.
Mobile SDK
It's a set of tools and resources that developers can use to create mobile apps for mobile operating systems, such as iOS or Android. It has a collection of libraries and utilities that can help you integrate Chatwoot with an app.
Mute
You can mute a conversation to stop receiving alerts for the same.
N
Notifications
There are four types of notifications in Chatwoot – audio, email, push, and Slack. You can customize your preferences from the Profile Settings and set up the Slack integration.
O
Open
A type of conversation’s status implying that a conversation is ready to be picked up by an agent.
Outgoing messages
Any messages sent from the Chatwoot dashboard in an outgoing message.
P
Pending
A type of conversation’s status.
Personal message signature
A personal message signature, if configured, is added to all the messages you send from your email inbox by default. You can set up your signature from the Profile Settings.
Private Notes
Private Notes are available within your conversation window. Here, you can privately discuss customer queries with your teammates before replying to conversations.
Portal
A single Help center instance is called a portal. You can create multiple portals from a single account. For, e.g., You can have two portals for your organization––one for maintaining product documentation and the other for maintaining internal processes.
Push notifications
If enabled, Chatwoot will send you push notifications whenever a specific event occurs. Examples of such events include a new message being created, a conversation being created, etc. Customize your preferences in the Profile Settings.
R
Reports
There are seven reports on Chatwoot, each providing an overview of certain analytics associated with your account.
Resolution count
A metric (also used in reports) that calculates the total conversations resolved in a period by a particular agent, team or inbox.
Resolution time
A metric (also used in reports) that calculates the total time taken to resolve a conversation by a particular agent, team or in a specific inbox.
Resolved
A type of conversation’s status, applied when a conversation is ready to conclude.
S
SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a setting that enables you to send messages from Chatwoot through your email inbox. Enable this option from your Email channel settings.
Snoozed
A type of conversation’s status applied when you need to wait a certain period or need a reply from the customer to continue the conversation.
T
Teams
An (internal) team is a group of specific agents on your account who usually handle a certain type of conversation. For, e.g. you can create an Engineering team for answering tech-related queries, a Finance team for billing-related queries, and the Customer Success team for product-related ones.
U
Unassigned
A type of conversation’s status, applied by default when a conversation hasn’t been assigned an agent yet––whether manually or automatically.
Unattended
On your dashboard, you'll find a view called "Unattended". This lists down all the conversations that are assigned and have yet to be responded to.
Recommended next: Intro to Chatwoot and customer engagement.