# Win back LiveChat visitors whose chats went unanswered

> Every couple of hours we find the chats your team never answered, email those visitors a real reply, and hand the sensitive ones to a support lead.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: LiveChat, Gmail, Slack
- Categories: Customer Support, Sales
- Published: 2026-08-31

## What it does

- Checks every couple of hours for live chats that ended without anyone on your team replying, ignoring automated greetings and bot canned responses.
- Emails those visitors a short, personal follow-up that repeats their question back to them and answers it outright when the answer is clear from how similar questions were handled before.
- Holds back anything sensitive, like a billing dispute, complaint or cancellation threat, so a person handles it instead of an automated email.
- Posts a Slack digest with how many chats were missed, how many were emailed, who had no email address on file, and the names worth picking up personally.

## What you'll need

- A LiveChat account with access to your archived chat history and permission to add tags to conversations
- A Gmail account to send the follow-up emails from
- A Slack workspace and a channel where your support leads want the digest
- Chats that collect a visitor email through the pre-chat survey or customer profile, since that is where the address comes from

## Prompt

Every two hours between 9am and 6pm on weekdays, find the LiveChat conversations that nobody on my team actually answered and win those visitors back over email.

Start by pulling the chats that ended since the last run with LiveChat List Archives, then open each one with Get Chat to read the full thread. Count a chat as missed only if the visitor sent at least one real message and no human agent ever replied. Automated welcome greetings, routing messages and bot canned responses do not count as a reply, so a thread where only the bot spoke is still a miss. Skip any chat whose thread already carries the followed-up tag.

For each missed chat, read the visitor name and email address from the pre-chat survey or the customer profile attached to the chat. Then use judgment before writing anything. Skip obvious spam and internal test chats. Skip visitors who came back later the same day and got helped in a later chat, since they already have their answer. If the conversation is sensitive, meaning a billing dispute, a complaint, or a threat to cancel, do not email that person at all: hand them to a human instead.

For everyone else, send a short personalized follow-up with Gmail Send a Message. Restate the visitor's actual question in their own words so it is obvious we read it, apologize briefly for missing them, and answer the question directly when the answer is clear from how similar questions were handled in the other chats you pulled. When the answer is not clear, say we want to help and ask them to reply with more detail. Keep it to a few plain sentences in a human voice, no marketing tone and no invented policy or pricing.

As soon as an email goes out, use Tag Thread to tag that LiveChat thread as followed-up, so the same person is never emailed twice and the tag doubles as a reporting filter inside LiveChat.

Guardrails: cap it at 15 emails per run so a bad classification can never turn into a blast, and never email the same address more than once in any 30 day window. Do not send follow-ups outside business hours; if a run is still working late, hold the remaining sends for the next run.

Close by posting a digest to my support channel with Slack Send a Message: how many chats were missed, how many visitors were emailed, which ones had no email address on file, and the sensitive or high value conversations listed by name with a one line reason, so a support lead can pick them up personally. If nothing was missed this run, post a single line saying so rather than an empty report.

## How to customize

- Change how often it runs and which hours count as business hours, so follow-ups never land overnight.
- Raise or lower the cap on emails per run, and the rule that stops the same address being emailed twice within 30 days.
- Adjust what counts as sensitive, so more or fewer conversations get handed to a person instead of being emailed.

## FAQ

### How does it know a chat was really missed?

It only counts a chat as missed when the visitor sent at least one genuine message and no human ever replied. Automated welcome messages, routing notices and bot canned responses do not count as an answer, so a chat where only the bot spoke still gets picked up.

### Could the same visitor be emailed twice?

No. As soon as a follow-up goes out, the conversation is tagged as followed-up in LiveChat and skipped on every future run. On top of that, the same email address is never contacted more than once in any 30 day window.

### What happens when there is no email address for the visitor?

Nobody gets emailed blind. Those visitors are listed by name in the Slack digest so your team can decide whether to chase them another way.

### Will it send an automated email to an angry customer?

No. Billing disputes, complaints and anything that reads like a cancellation threat are pulled out of the email list and named in the Slack digest instead, so a support lead can reply personally.

### Does this still work if we use a chatbot to greet visitors?

Yes, and that is exactly the case it is built for. Bot greetings and canned responses are treated as no answer at all, which is why chats that look handled in your dashboard still surface here.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/win-back-livechat-visitors-whose-chats-went-unanswered