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
Homepage: The Homepage is a welcome screen for your chat widget. It greets visitors, lists your configured actions in a friendlier way, and still includes a way to start chatting right away. Visitors can navigate to the Homepage from any screen in the chat widget while it's turned on.
Business card: Gives visitors a quick way to reach you outside of chat, with your company's contact info, logo, and hours.
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.
💡 Tip: Want to track chat and Engagement bar conversions in Google Analytics? If Google Analytics is enabled on your website, Nutshell can automatically emit chat events and chat action form submissions to Google Analytics—no configuration required.
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
Chat settings is organized into five tabs: Overview, Actions, Branding, Knowledge, and Chatbot behavior. Here's what each one covers.
The Overview tab: choose how visitors can reach you
The Overview tab is where you turn on the different ways visitors can reach you, and control what they see when they first land on your site. Each setting below is a card you can expand, enable, and disable independently.
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.
Turn on Show engagement bar to make it visible to visitors. Then choose up to 5 visible actions. The available actions are Chat, Quote, Text, Email, Call, and Book. Drag to reorder them, and toggle each one on or off. Actions you turn off move to the Hidden actions section.
Homepage
Turn on Enable homepage to show visitors a home screen when the engagement bar opens. Visitors see a greeting, your enabled actions as buttons, and a chat field they can use to start a conversation right away.
Business card
Turn on Enable business card to give visitors a quick way to reach you outside of chat.
The Homepage and Business card icons appear in the widget header, so visitors can jump between them from any screen.
Page load behavior
Controls how the engagement bar introduces itself when a page loads. Click into it to set:
Automatically open – choose what happens when a visitor lands on a page:
Nothing – let visitors open chat on their own terms
Smart nudges – AI-powered prompts that nudge a visitor to engage
A specific page – open straight to the home or actions page
Which page? – if you've chosen A specific page, pick which screen it opens to: your Homepage, or one of the engagement bar actions (Chat, Book, Email, Call, Text, Quote). This isn't a URL on your website — it's which screen inside the widget visitors land on.
Visible – choose whether this applies Only on desktop or Always
Call to action – the short text shown to invite visitors in (25 characters max)
Excluded URLs
Add custom URLs where you don't want chat to appear, like a signup page or billing form. Click + Add path to add a URL, and the chat widget won't load on that page for visitors.
The Actions tab: configure what visitors see
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.
💡Tip: Using the Booking action? Track how your meeting link is performing (bookings and availability trends) in the Scheduler report.
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.
Homepage
Before you turn on the Homepage in the Overview tab, configure it here. Choose an Actions layout — Stacked (each action as a full-width row) or Grid (a 2-column grid) — then customize the label shown for each enabled action, up to 25 characters each.
Disabled actions won't appear on your Homepage; enable them from the Overview tab if you'd like them included.
Business card
Before you turn on the Business card in the Overview tab, configure it here. Nutshell automatically populates this with the information you've already added in your account's General settings (Setup > Administration > General) — company name, address, business hours, and so on. Just double-check the details, make any edits you'd like, and add your company logo.
Visitors can open the business card from any screen in the widget, alongside the Homepage icon in the widget header.
The Branding tab: personalize your chatbot
Nutshell Chat is more than a widget—it’s often the first impression visitors will have of your business.
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.
The Knowledge tab: 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
Pages are re-crawled automatically in the background, so the chatbot stays current as your site changes without any manual effort on your part.
Use the Chat tester on the right to check how the chatbot responds to any question.
You'll see the answer and the pages it drew from. If something looks off, you can recrawl a page or add a custom answer right from there.
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
The Chatbot behavior tab: 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:
You can write custom Q&A pairs. If there's a question you want the chatbot to answer in a specific way, add it here and the chatbot will use your answer over anything it learned from crawling your site
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
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.
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.
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 and follow the prompts.
To make the chat visible to your website visitors:
Enable the Visible on your website toggle next to the Chat snippet button on the Chat settings page.
With these steps complete, the chat widget will be active on your site, ready to connect visitors with your team.
Managing chat threads
It's easy to drill down into all the conversations and leads originating from your chat widget. 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:
Engagement bar
Leads: All the leads created via the Engagement bar actions, which you can filter by specific actions. You can also customize the list to include specific columns.
Chatbot threads: Your chatbot threads. There are three tabs within the chatbot thread:
Active: All your known visitors with active chats
Unidentified: Visitors that are not yet known to Nutshell that have an open chat thread
Inactive: Closed threads
Agent 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.
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.
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 sidebar, you'll see a +Create Lead button. 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.
Reporting on chat widget engagement
If you want a clear, numbers-first view of how your chat widget is performing, check out the Engagement report. You can see how many people saw your widget, opened it, completed an action, became leads, and even became customers.
Learn how to use the Engagement report.
If you want to understand what people are actually asking—and where your chatbot needs a tune-up—head to the Chatbot report. It highlights common topics, top nudges clicked, feedback and frustration, and knowledge gaps.
Go to Reports > Other > Chatbot, or learn how to use the Chatbot report.
Privacy and usage guidelines
This AI chatbot is designed exclusively to assist visitors with information about the company's products and services. The chatbot has been trained specifically on the company's website content and is programmed to provide accurate, helpful responses only within the scope of the business offerings. If visitors ask questions outside this domain, the chatbot will politely redirect the conversation back to topics it can assist with. Interactions with the chatbot are used solely to improve the visitor experience and help connect them with the team—conversations are not used for unrelated purposes or shared with third parties.
Please note that the chatbot is a customer service and lead generation tool, not a substitute for professional advice. It cannot and will not provide medical, legal, financial, or other professional guidance. The chatbot's purpose is to answer questions about the company, help visitors understand how the solutions might meet their needs, and facilitate scheduling sales meetings or submitting contact forms. For any matters requiring professional expertise beyond the business scope, visitors are encouraged to consult with appropriate licensed professionals.
The chatbot operates within strict guidelines to protect visitor privacy while helping them find the information they need. If at any point the chatbot cannot adequately address a question, it will offer to connect the visitor directly with a member of the team who can provide more personalized assistance.
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 Visible on website toggle 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?
Pages are re-crawled automatically in the background, so the chatbot stays current as your site changes. For extra control, you can still manually recrawl any page, disable outdated content, or add custom Q&A pairs under Guidance in the Chatobot behavior tab. Use the Chat tester in the Knowledge tab to spot-check answers at any time — type a question, see the response, and see exactly which pages it came from.
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.
Can I turn off chat on specific pages?
Yes. Add the page's URL under Excluded URLs in the Overview tab, and the chat widget won't load there — useful for pages like a signup form or billing page where you don't want chat showing up.
Can I control what visitors see when they first load my site?
Yes. Under Page load behavior in the Overview tab, choose whether the engagement bar automatically opens to Smart nudges, opens straight to a specific screen (your Homepage or one of your engagement bar actions), or shows nothing until a visitor engages on their own terms. You can also set whether this applies on desktop only or everywhere, and customize the call-to-action text visitors see.
What's the difference between the Homepage and Smart nudges?
Smart nudges are AI-generated conversation starters based on the page a visitor is viewing. The Homepage is a home screen that greets visitors with your configured actions when the engagement bar opens. Neither is turned on by default, so you can use one, both, or neither.