Before you dive into the day-to-day guides, it helps to learn the language of Live Chat. This overview walks through the words used throughout the rest of the Live Chat guides — what a visitor is, what a conversation is, the statuses a conversation moves through, how a conversation is claimed, the three agent presence states, and the difference between a reply and an internal note. Once these click, the rest of the Live Chat guides will make sense at a glance.
Visitors
A visitor is anyone who opens the chat widget. By default a visitor is anonymous — you see their location, device, and the page they're on, but not their name. Once you call the identify API for a signed-in user, that visitor becomes identified, and the inbox enriches the conversation with their name, email, plan, and other profile details. Whether a visitor is anonymous or identified, their chat lands in the same shared inbox.
Conversations and where they come from
Each chat a visitor starts becomes a conversation — a single thread of messages between the visitor and your team. Every conversation lands in one shared Live Chat Inbox, no matter which surface it came from: your Cornerspot website, the Members Portal, or any external website where you've embedded the widget. One inbox, every channel.
Conversation statuses
Every conversation carries a status that tells you where it is in its lifecycle:
- Open — the conversation is active and being handled.
- Closed — the conversation has ended. The visitor can no longer message in that thread.
- Away - Converted to Support Ticket — a visitor messaged while your team was offline, and the conversation was turned into a support ticket so the request isn't lost. Opening one of these takes you to the resulting ticket.
You can filter the inbox by status to focus on just the open conversations, or to look back over what's been closed.
Unassigned vs. claimed conversations
When a conversation first arrives it's Unassigned — it's in the queue and any agent can pick it up. An agent claims a conversation to take ownership of it; once claimed, the header reads “Assigned to {agent}” and only that agent's name shows as the owner. Claiming is first-come-first-served, so exactly one agent ends up owning each conversation — no double-handling. You must claim a conversation before you can reply to the visitor.
Replies vs. internal notes
The composer has two modes, side by side:
- Reply — delivered to the visitor in real time. This is the message the visitor reads in the widget.
- Internal note — visible only to your team. Use it for context, hand-off details, or reminders. The visitor never sees it.
Switching to the Internal note tab changes the placeholder and accent so it's always clear which mode you're in, keeping private notes from ever reaching the visitor.
Agent presence: Active, Away, and Offline
Whether new chats route to you depends on your presence, set from the pill at the top of the inbox. There are three states:
- Active — you're receiving new chats and you consume one concurrent-connection slot.
- Away — you're paused; new chats won't route to you and your slot is freed, but you stay signed in.
- Offline — you're signed off entirely and your slot is freed.
Availability is always a manual choice — CornerSpot never signs you off automatically.
Putting it together
That's the whole vocabulary: a visitor (anonymous or identified) starts a conversation; the conversation has a status (Open, Closed, or converted to a ticket) and sits Unassigned until an agent claims it; agents reply to the visitor or leave team-only internal notes; and each agent's presence decides who receives new chats. The same operator inbox serves chats from your Cornerspot site, the Members Portal, and external embeds — so with these terms in hand, the rest of the Live Chat guides will feel familiar.
