Live Chat

Replying to a question

Click on the speech bubble next to your event in the Hijack list in order to visit the list of threads for that event.

Hover over a question to reveal a set of clickable actions underneath. Click on ‘Reply’ in order to respond to a question. On the next page, you will be presented with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor in which you can type your response. You can format your response with various text styles and add in hyperlinks and lists. You can even embed media into your reply. Click ‘Submit’ when your post is ready to be published.

Moderating Live Chat can be a challenge, especially during busy periods, but don’t worry if you lose track of which question you are replying to. You will find the original question in the ‘Thread details’ box to the right of the text editor.

Replying in a thread

The Thread Overview screen conveniently displays the initial ‘Message’ that kickstarted a thread and also shows the ‘Latest Reply’ to that topic. We’ve described how you can add a reply from this overview screen.

However, when Live Chat is busy and the ‘Number of Replies’ begins to stretch into double figures, you might want to read through a more detailed history of the chat thread before replying. This could be to check that one of your colleagues has not already provided a sufficient answer for example or to check whether there may have been other questions asked by a prospective student buried in the middle of the thread (we have included a useful ‘Unapproved Reply’ stress bubble so that these cases are easy to identify).

In this case, click on the chat bubble for the thread itself to visit a complete history of that thread, including all questions asked and all response given up to this point.

From this view, either hover over a question to bring up the reply options or click ‘Add Reply’ in order to provide your own response in the familiar WYSIWYG editor.

Finding Live Chat in the administrative backend

If you have enabled Live Chat for your Hijack, it is likely your audience are using the Chat interface on the front end in order to ask you and your staff questions relating to your Hijack’s subject matter.

You can view, manage and respond to Live Chats in the backend of the site.

Click on the ‘Hijacks’ option in the left hand sidebar to access the list view of your Hijacks. Alongside your various event names, you will see a column headed by a speech bubble. The speech bubble icon pertaining to your particular event will contain a number, denoting how many question threads exist for this Hijack.

Click on this speech bubble in order to view all Live Chat question threads for your event.

Alternatively, you can view your entire platform’s message history by clicking ‘Messages’ option inside the Hijack tab in the left hand sidebar.

Filtering chats by question status

Hijack includes some powerful filtering tools which become especially useful if you are moderating the Live Chat of several separate Hijacks or Chapters at once.

Every thread list on the platform can be filtered by three drop-downs at the top of the screen.

The drop-down furthest on the left filters threads by question status and is set to ‘All’ by default. Using this filter you are able to customise your view with some very handy options.

For example, you might be tasked with replying to as many unanswered questions as possible. You may be trying to find an overview of all updates your chat moderators have made over the course of an event or you could be looking to review unapproved replies to make sure your front end is up to date with appropriate comments.

Whatever the case, these filters can help narrow down your view and focus in on questions with a particular status to help speed up the job at hand.

Filtering chats by Hijack and Chapter

Hijack includes some powerful filtering tools which become especially useful if you are moderating the Live Chat of several separate Hijacks or Chapters at once.

Using the ‘Filter by Hijack’ and ‘Filter by chapter’ drop-downs when viewing any list of threads on the platform, you are able to customise this list depending on which view you find most useful to the task at hand. Some use cases are outlined below:

1. You want a general overview of all Live Chat activity happening on several separate Hijacks you have running at once. Use the ‘Filter by Hijack’ to load up the thread list for a single Hijack. Update the field and click ‘Filter chat’ again to easily switch between events.
2. You’ve been assigned to answer questions on a single chapter in a single Hijack. Use a combination of the filter dropdowns to isolate the exact chat, ensuring you only see what is relevant to your task and eliminating the distraction caused by seeing irrelevant new questions landing in your view.
3. You’re operating on the same chapter but across multiple different Hijacks. This is where the filter becomes incredibly useful. Say your institution has inserted a chapter on ‘Accommodation’ into multiple separate Hijacks but wants you to handle chat on all of them. Easy. Use the ‘Filter by chapter’ dropdown to choose the ‘Accommodation’ chapter and see the questions asked by users visiting that chapter but on all Hijacks it appears within. Now you can answer all Accommodation questions without needing to leave this single view!

Approving and un-approving messages

It is important to us that our customers have the power to moderate their own live chats. For this reason, all questions asked by your audience come through ‘Unapproved’ by default. This means that no question will be published within your Hijack without your say so.

Within chat threads, unapproved questions are highlighted in yellow – alerting you to the fact that they are not yet published. Hovering over these messages will reveal a set of actions. You can choose to ‘Approve’ the message if you are happy for it to appear on your site as it is, or to ‘Edit’ the message if a user has perhaps included sensitive information in their question or used language you would like to remove from the post.

Alternatively, if you feel the message has no place on your site whatsoever, you have the option to ‘Bin’ the message, which will prevent it appearing on the site and also remove it from the backend for good.