Chat Guide

Overview

Cadence Chat provides institutions a way to effectively communicate with contacts that reach out directly from the institution/university website. Cadence Chat blends chatbot automation and live web chat to help reach target audiences and improve your institution's digital experience by connecting visitors to the information they need quickly, and looping in your team for personalized assistance when needed.

Cadence Chat is implemented directly on your institution's website utilizing custom playbooks that are designed with tried-and-true best practices to ensure connections with contacts are made and help you reach institution goals.

Once Chat has gone "live" on your institution's website, Cadence Chat can integrate seamlessly into Cadence Text, providing the ability for staff members to text students for follow-up all within the same platform. Chat can also work as a standalone chatbot providing the ability to communicate with contacts on your website and/or provide contact information for additional follow up through another avenue outside of Cadence like email or phone.

The following article will go into more detail on:

Terms to know
How Chat works
Setting your availability, responding to a live chat, chat assignment and conversation details
Chat to Text: Contact Conversation History (Only available when using both Cadence Text and Chat)
Best practices

Terms to know:

Playbook: Playbooks are the roadmap of a chatbot conversation that steers website visitors to their desired destination. Playbooks are built around certain topics and goals, such as admissions and lead capture or enrollment and submitting a deposit.
Flows: If playbooks are roadmaps, think of flows as specific streets or routes. They break up the playbook to deal with specific sections of a topic or goal. One flow can be specifically used for capturing information; another flow can be presenting admissions information. A visitor can transition between flows throughout an interaction.
Widget: The widget is what site visitors see and engage with on the website - usually in the lower right-hand corner of the website.

Click here for more Chat Terms

How does Cadence Chat work?

As a contact interacts with the Chat widget on your website, they will be guided through personalized playbooks and flows specific to the information they're looking for. The chatbot will collect contact information, guide them to specific information/resources based on information they provide, and/or connect them directly with a staff member to communicate through a live chat or to provide their information for future follow-up.

Within Cadence, users and administrators can access Chat by clicking "Chat" on the left navigation.

Setting your availability

Chat users must set their Chat availability to be able to start receiving Chat conversations. Setting your availability can be found in away/available drop-down in the upper left corner. Each user/admin sets their own individual Chat availability.

Available- When set to "Available," Cadence Chat will start assigning incoming Chat conversations to you and placing them into "My Conversations."

Note: When multiple Chat users are available at the same time, conversations will be routed to a user in a round-robin format.

Away- When set to "Away," you will not receive any conversation assignments.

When you switch teams in Cadence, it will mark you as Away
When a user signs out of Cadence, they will be marked as Away
The technology will regularly do a pulse check on connection and set a user away proactively if they’ve lost their connection

Chat Conversation List

The Chat conversation list is where all Chat conversations will be stored. As conversations come into Cadence Chat, they will be placed into one of the following conversation areas:

My Conversations
Unassigned Conversations
Follow Ups
Other Conversations

My Conversations

"My Conversations" will only display Chats that have been assigned to you when you are set to "Available." When assigned, you will be in a live chat with the contact and are the only user that can respond.

Unassigned Conversations

Unassigned conversations will only appear if a team is using the "No Assignment" option. This will display all active conversations who have requested live chats, but have not been assigned to anyone.

Follow Ups

"Follow Ups" are Chat conversations in which the contact/visitor has either decided not to do a live chat and provided their contact information for future follow up OR no one was available for a Live Chat.

Any user can complete any of the conversations to contacts that are in "Follow Ups." The option to respond is not available in "Follow Ups" as the contact is no longer in the chat.

Other Conversations

"Other Conversations" are all other Chat conversations that aren't assigned to a user or marked to be followed up. These conversations can be past "closed" conversations, current conversations happening live on the website, or other live chats happening with another user on the team.

Replying to a Live Chat

A live chat will start when a contact chooses to speak to a staff member (real human and not the bot) in the Chat and a staff member is set to "Available." Cadence will look at all users who are set to "Available" and assign the conversation randomly. Once assigned, the conversation will appear in "My Conversations."

The conversation will show the chat thread/feed that the contact has had so far with the Chat Bot so that you can respond appropriately.

To reply, click in the text box at the bottom of the conversation, type your message and click "Send." Emojis can also be added to your replies.

Additional Actions

As you communicate with the contact, options are provided to further communicate via "Send Text", "Complete Follow Up" if you have followed up with the contact via another medium (email or phone call), transfer a conversation to another Cadence Chat team and/or if the conversation has ended to "Close Conversation."

Quick action icons are available at the top of the conversation to "close conversation', "send sms text" or view "contact details." Hovering over the icon will display what the icon does.

Assign gives Cadence users the ability to assign a Live Chat or Follow Up conversation to another user and/or Cadence Chat team within their organization.

Once the Assign icon has been selected, the Cadence user will be shown a list of teams and the available users for each team.

To see a list of users within a team, click on the team drop down arrow. A Chat user will be able to assign a conversation to "anyone" within a team, reassign it to themselves in another team OR to another user. If a Live Chat is transferred to a team where no users are available, the bot will ask the site visitor to leave a message with their questions and someone will follow up with them.

Once a user and/or team has been selected, the Cadence user will have the option to leave an internal note which will appear in the conversation view, but will only be viewable to Cadence users.

Send Text allows you to seamlessly transition the conversation from Cadence Chat to Cadence Text and start a conversation/communicate with the contact via text message.

See here for more detailed Chat to Text information

Complete Follow Up indicates that you have completed the follow up the student requested and mark the conversation as closed.

End Conversation will end the conversation and move it to the "Other Conversations" area. Ending a conversation indicates that the conversation with the contact has ended or they received the information they needed. A conversation will be marked as Closed after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Repeat visitors

Identified based on browser cache - different computer or browser, or cleared cache will result in new visitor
If a visitor comes back a second time and updates their contact information, it will be overwritten in past conversations in both Details and exports