Live chat with the ChurchLinker team

Where the chat lives

There are two places you'll find the live-chat entry-point, depending on whether you're browsing the marketing site or signed in to your church's tenant:

• churchlinker.com — the “Ask Ben” chat in the bottom-right corner. AI replies first; after the first message a “Talk to a human” button appears.
• Inside your dashboard (any church admin on /dashboard) — the “Help Assistant” in the bottom-right corner. Same shape: AI replies first, with a “Talk to ChurchLinker” footer.

How to tell if someone's online

The button shows you the current state. A green dot and “agent online now” means a ChurchLinker team member is at their desk and your message will be answered in real time. No green dot means we're away — your message still goes through, and we reply by email within one UK working day (the next morning if it's sent outside office hours).

Either way, the conversation stays open in the same chat panel. When you come back to the site or the dashboard, the panel re-opens with the full thread so you can pick up where you left off.

What to expect on response times

• Live chat (agent online): typically replies inside 30 seconds.
• Leave a message (agent offline): reply within one UK working day.
• Grow plan or above: priority queue; typical response inside four working hours during UK business hours.
• Enterprise: bespoke SLA agreed in your contract.

AI first, human second

Both chat widgets are AI-first by design. Ben (on the marketing site) and the Help Assistant (inside the dashboard) answer most product, pricing and how-it-works questions from the same knowledge base ChurchLinker staff would use. Try asking the AI first — it's instant, available 24/7, and gets a lot right.

When the AI can't get there, or you just want to talk to a person, the “Talk to a human” button hands off to the live-support flow with the conversation transcript attached so you don't have to repeat yourself.

What we see, and what we don't

• Transcript of this chat. Every message you send and every reply we send.
• Your first name and email (collected when starting a chat on the marketing site). On the tenant side we use your signed-in account.
• The page you started from. Helps us answer faster (“you're on /pricing, the Sprout plan...”).
• Your IP address and browser user-agent. Used only for abuse prevention and audit, never shared.

We do not see your church's member data, donation records, or any tenant-side content from this chat. If you need to share specific details to get help, you do that explicitly by typing them in.

For ChurchLinker staff: replying to chats

If you're a ChurchLinker team member, the inbox lives at /admin/support (platform admins only). Click “Go online” in the top right to advertise yourself as available — visitors instantly see the green “agent online now” dot. Close the tab or click the toggle again to go offline; presence lapses silently after 90 seconds of no heartbeat.

Each new thread also drops an email into the team inbox (the same address as marketing leads) so you don't have to watch the page constantly. Reply directly from /admin/support — replying auto-claims the thread to you and flips the status to RESPONDED.

Detailed staff guide: /docs/live-support-staff.