Nutshell Chat is available on the Engagement Foundation plan and above. The ability to customize chatbot appearance is available on the Engagement Pro plan.
Your website visitors are often your warmest prospects—they’re curious, they have questions, and they’re exploring if your business can help them. With Nutshell Chat, you can make sure no opportunity slips through the cracks.
See how to set up and manage your AI chatbot:
Ways to connect with visitors
Nutshell Chat gives you a few ways to connect with your web visitors:
Live chat with your team: Your team can reply directly to visitors in real time, building relationships and answering questions personally.
AI chatbot: An always-on teammate that automatically responds to questions. When a human touch is needed, the chatbot can hand the conversation off to your team.
Smart nudges: Serve AI-generated suggested questions and contextual conversation starters on each page on your website. Smart nudges are prompts that help visitors begin a chat based on the content or context of the page they’re viewing.
Engagement bar: The Engagement bar allows you to set up and display multiple calls to action (CTAs) in the chat widget. You can configure the Engagement bar to guide visitors toward actions that matter most for your business, such as:
Chat
Book a meeting
Call
Text
Quote
Email
Visitors can interact with these CTAs directly from the chat widget, making it easier for them to take the next step while browsing your site.
Together, these tools ensure that your website is never a dead end for a curious prospect, whether it’s during business hours or after.
Why use Nutshell Chat?
Instead of hoping your visitors will call or fill out a form, you can:
Meet them where they are, right on your website
Offer instant answers, day or night
Collect leads, meeting bookings, and form submissions automatically
Jump in personally whenever someone needs a human response
With just a little setup, you’ll have both your team and your chatbot working side by side to engage your visitors and win more business.
Get started with Nutshell Chat
To get started, your admin will first need to configure and embed your chat widget.
Click on Engagement > Setup > Chat
1. Set up your Engagement bar
The Engagement bar helps guide visitors toward completing key actions while browsing your site, giving them easy access to the options that matter most for your business. Here you can configure which actions are visible and accessible to visitors in your chat widget.
You can select up to five actions and arrange them in the order you want them to appear. The available actions are Chat, Booking, Call, Text, Quote, and Email. Any actions you don’t want visible can simply be moved to the Hidden actions section.
Minimized view call to action: The text you’d like to show in the minimized chat widget view, i.e., the field where users will add their questions
Smart nudges: These are AI-generated prompts that automatically appear in the chat widget based on the context of the page your visitor is viewing. For example, if someone is browsing your product page, they might see prompts like “How can I learn more about your products?” Turning this setting on will display three AI-generated nudges in the chat window to help your visitors start a conversation.
Show engagement bar: When this is turned on, visitors will see the actions you’ve marked as visible displayed at the bottom of the chat widget, along with your smart nudges.
2. Craft an appealing Engagement bar
The Actions tab is where you can configure the actions that appear in your chat widget. You can customize the opening message your user will see before the first form field, edit the form, and set lead creation rules.
Within the chat configuration action, you can add a customizable message that will appear at the start of a chat. You can format it with bold or italics, include links (such as to your privacy policy), and use it to let visitors know that chats are recorded.
By default, forms are added for Chat, Email, Call, Text, and Quote. You can edit/change these forms at any time. For the Chat action, you can also choose to create a lead for each inbound chat, and which pipeline the lead should be added to when a conversation generates a new lead.
For the Quote action, you can choose to create a lead after a visitor completes a quote request and which pipeline the lead should be added to.
For the Booking action, you can select a meeting from the available meetings in the dropdown. If no meetings are configured, you will be directed to Scheduler so you can set one up.
You can also customize the text that appears on each action in the Engagement bar to match your messaging. The action label text is limited to 8 characters.
3. Personalize your chatbot
Nutshell Chat is more than a widget—it’s often the first impression visitors will have of your business.
Appearance
Here you’ll be able to customize the:
Company & chatbot name: The name you’d like to display on the chat widget, like your company name and perhaps a different name for your chatbot
Show ‘Powered by Nutshell’ watermark: This will be displayed at the bottom of your chat widget
Logo + Chatbot icon: Choose from default options for your chatbot icon, and upload a custom image for your logo/avatar
Widget color: Select from default colors for your primary (widget) and secondary (the customized nudges within the chat widget) colors, but you can also choose a specific color by clicking the '+' button
As you make edits to the look and feel of your widget, you’ll be able to see the preview of what it looks like on the right side.
4. Teach your chatbot about your business
The chatbot can only be as helpful as the knowledge it has access to. That’s where the Knowledge tab comes in. Here, you’ll give your chatbot the content it needs to respond accurately to your visitors.
Add your content: Upload PDFs (like brochures, FAQs, or guides) or provide website URLs.
See what’s been indexed: Each item shows a title or summary, the date it was crawled, and whether it’s active or disabled.
Take action anytime:
View the content
Exclude/disable without deleting
Recrawl for updates
Delete permanently
You’ll also see a knowledge capacity bar on the bottom left of the sidebar that shows how much words of content been added. Each Nutshell account can store up to 75,000 words of content across up to 100 pages. If you run into the limit, simply disable less important pages to make room for new ones.
The result: a chatbot that sounds like it knows your business inside and out.
Want to preview how your chatbot will look and work before you commit to the chatbot?
You can either:
Click the Nutshell chatbot card on the dashboard
Click the Preview button in Chat setup
Enter your website URL
You’ll instantly see a test version of the chatbot. You can ask it questions and see how the chatbot responds directly in Nutshell. You can also click the ‘Copy link’ button in the top right to view the preview in a new window
5. Customize your chatbot's behavior
Think of this as setting your chatbot’s “personality” and deciding when it should step in to help.
Here’s what you can customize:
When should the chatbot respond?: Options include:
Always: The chatbot replies right away, even if your team is online.
Only when your team is offline: The chatbot acts as backup, covering for your team when no one’s available.
Never (disable chatbot): Turn the chatbot off if you only want human-to-human chat.
Set the conversation tone: Choose whether you’d like your chatbot to sound Neutral, Friendly, or Professional, depending on how you want to represent your brand.
Answer length: Decide how detailed responses should be: Concise, Normal, or Complete.
Add guidance: Give your chatbot helpful hints about how it should respond (for example, Encourage visitors to order the August promotion).
Topics to avoid: List any subjects you’d prefer your chatbot not mention or answer. For example: competitor information
Handoff rules: You can configure how you assign threads when your team members are online in different ways:
Round-robin: Evenly distribute chats among your team
Specific-user: Always direct chats to a designated person
Nobody: Leave the conversation open for team members to pick up themselves
6. Configure your offline form
You can configure an offline form that visitors will see if no team member is available to chat. Access the form by clicking the Edit form link:
You can:
Customize the form fields
Configure your spam prevention preference
Customize your success message seen after form submission
Set up rules for creating Person, Company, or Lead rules
Set up notifications so your team is alerted whenever a visitor submits the form
You can also view your offline form engagement, submissions, and respondents list.
7. Set up your team as agents
Agents are team members with an Engagement license, allowing them to manage and respond to chats. They play a key role in providing support, and their availability helps determine how visitors interact with your team.
Assigning Engagement licenses
Engagement licenses are purchased and assigned per user. Head to the Users & teams page, where you’ll be able to toggle the Engagement license on for the user/s you’d like to allocate it to.
Managing agents as an admin
Admins have full access to the Agents page in the Engagement sidebar menu. This page serves as the central hub providing your admin with a full view of their agent list. Additionally, they can:
View agent's status
Set individual availability to "Available" or "Not accepting chats."
Monitor the number of open chats each agent is handling, with a clickable link to dive into those conversations.
Setting availability as a non-admin agent
Non-admin agents can easily manage their availability status. To update your availability, click on your avatar in the top right corner of the app and toggle the "Available" setting. When set to "Available," chats will be automatically assigned to you. If you're not ready to accept chats, simply toggle it off.
Additionally, you can set your availability to automatically toggle on when using Nutshell. This way, you won’t need to manually update your status each time.
When this setting is on and you'd like to mark yourself as 'Not accepting chats', you can toggle it on, and it will remain off until the next business day.
8. Embed and enable your chat widget
To make your chat widget live on your website, you’ll need to embed the chat widget and ensure it’s enabled.
On the Chat settings page, look for the Chat snippet button in the header.
Click it to open the embed modal, where you’ll find the code snippet for your chat widget.
To make the chat visible to your website visitors:
Check the Enable chat on your website checkbox next to the Chat snippet button on the Chat settings page.
Alternatively, you can toggle the widget on directly within the embed dialog after copying the code.
With these steps complete, the chat widget will be active on your site, ready to connect visitors with your team.
Managing chat threads
The Engagement page in the main navigation menu is the hub of your organization’s chat and text message threads, organized by thread status.
On this page, you’ll see:
Chat thread overview:
All: Your chat inbox, including opened and closed threads.
Unassigned: Chats that have not been assigned to an agent based on configuration/availability.
Your inbox: Your active chats.
Chatbot: The inbox for all open chatbot thread.s
Closed: Conversations that are completed i.e. marked as closed by the agent.
Thread assignment: Each thread shows who it’s assigned to. Admins can reassign threads if needed, while non-admins will only see their assigned threads.
Filter: Admins can filter text messages by team members, and non-admins will only see threads assigned to them.
Visitor presence in chats
While engaging with visitors, you’ll be able to see their real-time presence:
Active visitors will show a green dot and a “Chatting now” status, indicating they are actively chatting with you.
Inactive visitors will appear with a gray dot, and you’ll also be able to see when they were last seen, helping you know when they were last active in the chat.
Creating a lead from a chat
You can turn a web chat visitor into a lead directly from the chat thread view.
In the chat thread, you'll see a +New Lead button next to the visitor's name. Clicking this button lets you quickly create a lead and assign it to a specific pipeline, connecting the visitor's details to your sales process. This ensures you can capture potential opportunities directly from your chat conversations.
FAQs
How do I set specific hours when my team is available for chats?
While agent availability is set individually, you can also use the Offline settings on the Goals page to customize the experience for visitors who reach out during off-hours.
Can admins reassign a chat to a different agent?
Yes, admins can reassign chats directly from the chat thread view. This ensures chats reach the right agent if a reassignment is needed for expertise or availability.
Is there a limit to the number of agents I can have?
The number of agents is determined by the Engagement licenses your team has purchased. You can assign and manage these licenses in the Users & teams page.
Can visitors send attachments through the chat widget?
Currently, visitors can only send text-based messages, URLs included.
What if I want to temporarily disable chat?
You can disable the chat widget by unchecking the Enable chat for your website in Web chat settings.
How can I notify a visitor that a chat might take longer to respond to?
You can include this information in the welcome message or offline form message. For example, you can set a custom message like, “Thanks for reaching out! We’ll respond as soon as we can.”
What happens to chats if an agent goes offline in the middle of a conversation?
If an agent goes offline during a chat, the conversation remains in the chat queue.
Can I see chat threads on timelines?
Absolutely, you’ll see closed chat threads right at the top of a Person, Company, or Lead timeline. Clicking on it will open the sidebar where you can view the full conversation in read-only.
How do I update or improve chatbot responses over time?
You can edit suggested answers, update the knowledge base it draws from, and review conversation logs to refine its behavior
How do I ensure the chatbot is giving updated information?
Regularly review and update the knowledge base, suggestions, and topics to avoid. This keeps responses accurate and aligned with your current offerings.
Can the chatbot handle multiple visitors at the same time?
Yes! The AI chatbot can engage with many visitors simultaneously, making it perfect for busy periods without requiring extra staff.