In this guide, you’ll learn how to use MessageBird’s Conversation Bridging (Beta). This beta feature in Live Chat enables your customers to seamlessly connect an ongoing Live Chat conversation from the Omnichannel Widget to another platform, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, and more.

How does it work? 

As an Inbox manager, you can configure and enable Conversation Bridging under the Automation and Behaviour section in the Omnichannel Widget Settings. Here you can specify the wait time threshold - this is the maximum time you want your customers to wait in the queue for an agent to accept a ticket. 

Setting up the time-based trigger

If the wait time threshold is triggered, we’ll send an automated Live Chat message to your customers from your Company Profile (illustrated below). With this message, there are clickable channels buttons that are fetched from your Omnichannel Widget settings.

Available channels for Conversation Bridging 

Conversations Bridging is currently only available for the following channels:

• WhatsApp

• Email Pro (Free Inbox email is currently not available)

• SMS

• Telegram

• LINE

UPDATE: Recent changes to Facebook Messenger's API in Europe have removed the ability to bridge conversations to Facebook Messenger. They plan to reinstate this functionality in the future but there are no timelines on this. In the interim, we are forced to remove Facebook Messenger from the list of available channels for Conversation Bridging. 

What is the Conversation Bridging user experience?

Customers can initiate the Conversation Bridging flow by selecting a channel button. Each channel has its own flow to verify the customer, connect the conversations, and merge the contacts in Inbox: 

WhatsApp, Telegram, and LINE

These channels pass a unique “conversation code” through a pre-populated message. In the background, we’ll look for the conversation code and automatically merge the two omnichannel conversations/contacts into one. By doing so, there is one omnichannel conversation from the customer perspective and one ticket from the agent perspective. 

SMS and Email

Users need to verify their credentials through a simple one time password (OTP) flow.  

Stay on Live Chat

There is always a “Stay on Live Chat” option that gives customers the choice to dismiss Conversation Bridging and wait on Live Chat for an agent to accept their ticket. 

Once the conversations are connected and merged, your customers can continue their conversation in the new channel (e.g. WhatsApp) and/or Live Chat - the choice is theirs!