Sessions and Persistent Chat
Imagine a website visitor is interested in your product offering ❗
And they engage with your chatbot. 👀
Only to navigate to another page and lose all the context of their chat… 😵
Insent chat is persistent and all chat history from your visitors across sessions and conversations are tracked and displayed. This helps ensure that your visitors never lose context of how they engaged with your organisation in their previous visit. Insent allows visitors to go back and scroll through previous chats they might have had with the bot or with agents in your organisation. This ensures that the conversations are seamless and unified.
At the end of this article, you will learn the following:
- What is a session in Insent?
- How long is a chat session persistent for your visitor?
Benefits of the Insent’s approach to Persistent chat
Your visitors do not lose context across different visits to your website while ensuring that their conversation history is preserved across conversations and spanning sessions.
Iteratively profile and advance your visitors down the funnel through audience segmentation rules and tailor-made conversations for each audience. Insent empowers the visitors with the right context based on their intent.
What is a session in Insent?
The length of a user session in Insent is defined as 30 minutes from the most recent visitor touchpoint with the Insent bot on your website.
After this period, a session is said to expire, and subsequent visits to the website are considered a new session.
If a visitor is inactive for over 30 minutes without engaging with the Insent bot and closes the tab, then their current session is considered as expired.
After a session expires, a new conversation is initiated whenever a visitor arrives and meets an audience condition. All the conversations that a visitor has participated in across different sessions will be listed in the Insent chat widget.
Conversation history is preserved across different chat sessions.
How long is a chat session persistent for your visitor?
Insent helps you to qualify your visitors based on audience segmentation rules and determine when to start a conversation and which segment of visitors should be shown a specific conversation.
Your website visitors might have something in mind when they arrive on your website. They might visit your site once and meet a specific audience condition, which will walk them through a conversation flow. They might browse through your website, consume content, chat with the bot or an agent during this session.
Insent chat widget displaying a list of conversations across different sessions and audience categories.
How does Persistent Chat empower your organization?
Persistent chat in Insent is designed to help ensure that your visitors, leads, and customers receive the best chat experience that contextualizes chat based on session, audience, and intent.
With persistent chat you can:
- Setup custom greeting messages that are shown to your visitors each time they arrive on your website.
- Notify your agents based on visitor activity - how many times they have visited your website or based on time spent on your website.
- If your visitor previously engaged with someone on your team, you can set up conversations to notify the same person and let them know! This will help create meaningful conversations (that convert!).
Below: How your visitors will experience persistent chat in Insent based on Session and Audience criteria.
| Session | Scenario | Chat Persistence |
| Same session | Visitor arrives for the first time and meets audience category “A”. |
The Chat will continue if the same conversation is configured on the new page.
If a different conversation is initiated on the new page, then the previous conversation will be listed in the chat widget. |
| New session | Repeat visitor arrives on the website and meets audience category “A” |
The greeting message will be shown when the visitor starts the new session.
The same conversation will be initiated once again. Messages sent to the visitor in the previous session will be preserved in the conversation history. |
| New session | Repeat visitor arrives on the website and meets new audience category “B” |
The new conversation for the audience segment is shown.
The previous bot conversation will be listed in the chat widget as a separate conversation. |
| New session | An agent joined the conversation and sent the visitor a message after they left the website. Repeat visitor arrives on the website and meets the same audience category “A”. |
The greeting message will be shown when the visitor starts the new session.
The same conversation will be initiated again, but the chat history will be present in the same conversation along with the agent connection notification and messages received. |
| New session | An agent joined the previous conversation (audience category “A”) and sent the visitor a message after they left the website. Repeat visitor arrives on the website and meets new audience category “B”. |
The new conversation for the audience segment is shown.
The chat initiated by the agent and the notification informing the visitor about the agent joining the chat will be shown in the chat history of the previous conversation in the chat widget. |
Quick Recap
The Insent chat experience is designed to ensure that your visitors do not lose context across different sessions. Chat history is shown to a visitor based on session and audience criteria. This helps drive the best buyer experience for your visitors.