Live chat support, without leaving the app

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Live chat support, without leaving the app

You can now start a support conversation from inside FirstSales. A chat widget sits in the corner of every screen, and the sidebar carries a direct support email link next to it.

What changed

Getting help used to mean leaving the product. You would open your mail client, write out where you were and what you were trying to do, attach a screenshot if you remembered, and then wait without any sense of whether the message had landed. By the time a reply came back, you had usually moved on to something else and had to reconstruct the problem from memory.

The chat widget removes that round trip. It opens over whatever screen you are already on, so you can describe a problem while it is still in front of you. Your conversation history stays in the widget, which means a follow-up two days later picks up where the last message ended rather than starting from nothing.

The sidebar also now carries a support email link. Some questions are better as email: a long description, a file attachment, something you want a written record of. That link is there for those, and it drops you into a message addressed to the right inbox rather than an address you have to look up.

How to use it

Click the chat bubble in the lower corner of any screen. Type your question the way you would say it out loud. You do not need to know the name of the feature or format the message in any particular way.

Two details make a support conversation move faster. First, say what you were trying to do, not only what went wrong. "I was trying to launch a campaign and the button stayed greyed out" gives more to work with than "the button is broken." Second, if the problem is on a specific campaign, contact list, or connector, name it. Support can look at the same thing you are looking at once they know which one it is.

You can keep working with the widget open. It does not block the page behind it, so you can carry on setting things up while you wait for a reply, and the conversation stays where you left it if you navigate elsewhere.

For anything that needs a file, a long explanation, or a paper trail you want in your own inbox, use the support link in the sidebar instead. Both routes reach the same team.

Why it matters

The gap between hitting a problem and getting an answer is where most of the frustration in a product lives. Outreach work is sequential. A campaign that will not launch blocks everything downstream of it, so an hour of waiting on an answer is often an hour of nothing else happening either.

Support that lives inside the product shortens that gap in a way that a separate email thread cannot. You are already in the account, on the screen where the problem is, with the details fresh. There is less to explain and less to get wrong in the explaining.

There is a second effect that matters more over time. When asking is easy, people ask about small things: a setting they are not sure about, a number that looks off, a step they want to confirm before running it against a real list. Those small questions are the ones that prevent large problems. When asking means composing an email, most of them go unasked and get resolved by guessing instead.

What support can see

Support sees your workspace name and the screen you were on when you started the conversation. That is what makes it possible to answer a question about "this campaign" without asking you to paste identifiers.

Support does not see your password, your connector credentials, or the contents of your mailbox. If a question requires looking at something that is not visible to them, they will ask you for it directly rather than pulling it from your account.

When to use chat and when to use email

Chat suits anything you would ask a colleague sitting next to you: a quick confirmation, a setting you cannot find, a number that does not look right, a campaign behaving in a way you did not expect. These are the questions where a two minute answer saves an hour of trial and error.

Email suits anything with weight to it. A billing question you want documented. A bug report with a file attached. A description long enough that typing it into a chat box would be awkward. A request that will take some back and forth over several days.

Neither route is a lower tier of support. They reach the same people and the same queue. The difference is the shape of the conversation, and picking the one that fits your question tends to get you a useful answer faster.

What makes a fast answer

Most support conversations are slow for one of three reasons, and all three are avoidable from your side.

The first is a missing subject. "It is not working" needs three exchanges before anyone knows what "it" is. Naming the screen and the thing you clicked removes those three exchanges entirely.

The second is a missing expectation. Describing what happened is half of a bug report. The other half is what you expected instead. Sometimes the behaviour is correct and the expectation was reasonable but wrong, and that conversation is much shorter when both sides are on the table from the start.

The third is a screenshot that has been cropped to the error. The error message is rarely the useful part. The surrounding state, which campaign, which contact, what was configured, is what tells you why the error happened. A wider screenshot answers more questions than a tight one.

Availability

The chat widget and the support email link are available on every screen, for every workspace, on all plans.