Tilkly Feature
Tilkly Live Chat: Talk to Your Visitors in Real Time, Right from Your Dashboard
Be there when your visitors have questions. Tilkly Live Chat adds a friendly real-time chat widget to your site with replies managed from your dashboard, session history, and automatic 30-day cleanup.
What is Tilkly Live Chat?
Tilkly Live Chat is a real-time chat widget that sits on your published site and lets visitors start a conversation with you instantly. You reply from your Tilkly dashboard, chats are saved so you never lose context, and old conversations are automatically cleared after 30 days to keep things tidy. No third-party chat service needed.
What Tilkly Live Chat does
Tilkly Live Chat is a real-time visitor support widget that you can enable on any published Tilkly site. The widget is a small launcher bubble that opens a panel where visitors send messages. Replies stream back to the panel over Server-Sent Events, so the visitor sees your response within milliseconds without polling or page refreshes.
On the dashboard side, every account member sees the inbox, can read history, and can reply. Online and away status, custom away messages, unread counts, and missed-reply emails round out the experience. Tilkly Live Chat is included on the Managed Monthly and Managed Annual plans.
How visitors experience the chat
A small launcher in the bottom corner of every published page invites visitors to start a conversation. The first click opens a panel that asks for a name, email, and consent. After consent, the visitor types a message and Tilkly creates a chat session linked to your workspace.
A session token is stored in the visitor’s browser. If the visitor closes the tab and returns the next day, they pick up the same conversation. If you reply while they are offline, a missed-reply email goes out so the conversation keeps moving even when the panel is closed.
How you respond as the site owner
The Live Chat section of your dashboard has an Open tab and a Closed tab. Open conversations show the visitor’s name, email, and the page the conversation started on. A presence dot tells you who is still active. Unread badges keep you focused on what needs attention.
Click into a chat to load the full history, then reply in the inline composer. Shift+Enter inserts a line break, Enter sends. You can close the chat when the issue is resolved; closed chats stay searchable until the 30-day GDPR window expires.
The dashboard also includes an Online and Away toggle with a custom away message that the visitor widget shows when you are offline. That lets you set expectations without losing the inbound conversation.
Privacy and compliance
Conversations and messages auto-delete 30 days after the last message. Visitor consent is required before the first message is stored, and the consent timestamp is logged with the chat record.
Tilkly Live Chat does not load tracking pixels, does not call third-party analytics from the widget, and does not sell any visitor data. The widget script is served from the same origin as your site, so it does not show up as a third-party request in privacy audits.
Tilkly Live Chat vs Intercom and Drift
Intercom and Drift are heavy customer-success platforms that bundle bots, marketing automation, AI agents, and per-seat pricing. They are the right call when a sales team runs sophisticated outbound playbooks at scale.
Tilkly Live Chat is the right call when a small team or solo founder wants a fast, private, real-time channel for visitor questions, without per-seat fees and without sending conversation data to a third-party platform. It lives in the same dashboard as your site, your forms, and your store.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Tilkly Live Chat available on the free plan?
No. Live Chat is included on the Managed Monthly and Managed Annual plans. Free workspaces can still use Tilkly Forms for visitor messages and email follow-up.
How many visitors can chat at the same time?
Tilkly streams updates over Server-Sent Events with a per-workspace connection limit of 5 concurrent owner streams. Visitor messages are queued in real time and rate-limited to 10 per minute per visitor.
Can I set an away message or office hours?
Yes. You can toggle online and away from the chat dashboard and set a custom away message that visitors see in the widget when you are offline.
Do visitors need an account to chat?
No. Visitors enter a name and email, accept consent, and start chatting. A session token is stored locally so the same visitor returns to the same conversation on the next visit.
How long is chat history retained?
Conversations auto-delete 30 days after the last message under the GDPR retention policy. You can also close a chat manually at any time.
Can multiple team members reply to the same chat?
Yes. Every account member on the workspace sees the inbox and can reply. The dashboard surfaces unread counts and presence so the team can hand off conversations.
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