Documentation

Chat Messages

Chat messages are proactive engagement elements that send a personalised message to a website visitor through the chat widget. They arrive as an incoming chat message, creating a natural opening for a conversation based on what the visitor is doing.

How Chat Messages Work

Chat messages are delivered through your existing chat widget, appearing as automated messages that visitors receive while browsing your site. Unlike banners, which sit on top of the page content, messages integrate into the chat itself, so they read as part of the conversation.

The message is saved in the conversation

Each time a chat message is sent, its text is also saved into the visitor's conversation. That gives you a record of what was said to whom, and the agent who picks up a reply sees your message above it.

  • Which conversation: the visitor's newest website-chat conversation, however old it is — so the message can land at the end of a conversation from months ago. A visitor with no conversation yet gets a new one.
  • Who it is from: it has no sender. The visitor sees it as coming from Vex when they open the chat, and the inbox shows the same name.
  • It stays quiet until the visitor writes back. The conversation shows up under All in the inbox, but not under Unassigned, and no agent is notified. One exception: if the visitor's newest conversation is already waiting for an answer, agents are notified as for any new message there, with your chat message as the preview.
  • The inbox AI tools skip it. AI Reply and AI Summary ignore messages that have no sender, so they don't see this one — see AI Tools.

Write {{name}} (exactly like that, no spaces) to greet the visitor by first name — it becomes the first word of their name, in the pop-up and in the saved message alike. When the name is unknown it is simply left out, so Hi {{name}}, welcome back! becomes Hi , welcome back!.

Visitors who are fully blocked (banned from chat) don't receive chat messages — the message would invite a reply they can't send — so nothing is saved for them either. As a safety rule, a message is also never saved for a visitor who belongs to a different organization. Banners, surveys and tours are unaffected.

Triggering Chat Messages

Chat messages can be triggered by events and conditions such as page visits, time-based rules or custom events sent from your application. For details on configuring them, see the trigger documentation.

Trigger Configuration

Learn about all available trigger options and how to configure them for your messages.

Message Settings

Basic Configuration

Name
string required
A descriptive title for your message, used in the dashboard.
Widget
string required
Which chat widget this message belongs to — and therefore which website it appears on. A brand has at most one chat widget, so in practice you are choosing the brand.
Published
boolean
Whether the message is active and can be sent to visitors.
Content
string required
The text of the chat message.
Action on clicking the notification
select
What happens when the visitor clicks the message bubble (see Message Actions below).

The Chat Messages List

Each chat message is a card showing its content preview, name, widget, status badge and creation date, plus a one-line performance summary for the last 30 days: how many people the message was shown to, how many of them clicked it, and what share that is. Hover any figure for the full sentence; a message nobody saw in that period says so instead of showing zeros. The card footer carries a Reports shortcut button next to Edit, so the delivery records are one click from the list.

Message Priority

Priority is not set inside the editor. On the Chat Messages list, each card footer shows a Priority number with two arrow buttons beside it — hover them for Increase priority and Decrease priority. When several chat messages qualify for the same visitor at the same moment, only the heaviest one is sent — messages compete with other messages, not with banners, surveys or tours.

Message Actions

Configure what happens when a visitor clicks your message in the chat interface:

Start conversation

Opens a full conversation in the chat widget, ready for the visitor to reply. You can optionally pick a workflow to start it with — the picker lists the chosen widget's active custom workflows, and None leaves the conversation to start empty.

Open widget home

Opens the widget's home screen with whatever you put there on Brand → (your brand) → Chat widget → Home.

Preview & Testing

Use the built-in preview to see how your chat message will appear in the widget. The preview shows the message bubble styled with your widget's colors and branding. It shows up to 6 lines of text and cuts off the rest, and it prints {{name}} as written rather than filling in a name.

Testing engagement campaigns

Learn how to safely test your campaigns before letting them reach live visitors.