Freshchat - Disable Offline chat / Offline chat creates multiple tickets

Matthew - I apologise for not being clear on this feature. You can turn off Offline chat by going into Live Chat-> Preferences --> Chat Availability. There will be an option to Hide chat window when agents are not available. This will hide your chat window when your agents are not available or outside business hours.

As for the missed chat form that appears when a chat has not been picked up after being in queue, previously the customer was redirected to a new ticket form. Instead, now they can leave a message right there. If you want to be able to continue to send them to a new ticket form, you can use the Custom Link option, and provide your ticket form URL there.

Also, when Offline chat is enabled (or when the form appears for Missed chats), tickets are created only when a visitor submits a message. If visitors type out a few messages and close the page, this will not be a ticket. 

I hope this makes the feature more clear, and allows you to customise according to your needs. 

We have that turned off - but it doesn't seem to work - we still get offline messages.

The offline messages will still appear due to missed chats. This is when your agents are available, but don't pick up a chat when a visitor pings you. If you do not want that, you can choose the option of a custom link in you Non-availability message (in chat settings), and give a url of your choice. Your website visitors will be directed here, instead of the offline form. 

If you have more questions, I would be happy to set up a screen share sessions with one of our support folks to walk you through the set up :)

Here is my situation.

We want to have the chat bar show on the screen, with the text for when agents are available. When clicked it comes up with a message, as you noted, with a custom message. In that message we can put a link to submit a ticket. However, most users are using the form below for leaving an offline message vs a ticket. We need a way to simply just have the text come up with the Link to Submit a Ticket.

I know you can turn off chats when offline,. However, this removes the ability to have a consolidated access point for our customers.

Justin - Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to insert the Submit Ticket link in our offline chat. We don't have any workarounds for this right now, but if I come across a tweak or feature you can use for this, I will update you.