With a smaller team, we'd like to protect the customer experience by automatically turning chat off for new customers if we're backed up and a customer has already been waiting the queue for over a designated time without help.
An automated feature to make the chat widget unavailable when a customer's wait time exceeds a maximum preset would allow us to protect the customer experience from waiting for too long without assistance.
This is a great idea and would be a critical piece of functionality. Currently, we have to rely on our agents monitoring incoming chats and the current wait time, then collectively going invisible. This takes away a great deal of focus from our team, and should definitely be considered as essential functionality.
@Dat Le @Megan G Thanks for sharing your concern around queue management at your shared company. Although we do not have any plans to add this functionality to Chat in the next 9 months, I can share some best practices and alternative solutions that some other customers have used.
With Chat Triggers, one condition you can use is account queue size to determine when to send a message. You can create a trigger to be sent when the queue size is too large and explain to the visitor that they can wait or leave and you will respond via email (on the ticket created from the chat session).
If you really want the ability to show or hide the widget based on department queue size/wait time today, you will need to build something custom using our Real Time APIs. You would build a middle service that reads the queue size/department via the streaming mechanism and make the decision if the widget should be shown or not to the visitor (using the Web Widget API).
With Messaging being the future for the Chat product, the concept of a real time queue goes away and the conversation is more asynchronous. The requirement to set a limit becomes less important, as the response time expectation of the channel is less compared to session based chat.
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