What Happens When You End a Live Chat

When a live chat ends, two key things happen: 
  1. Help Scout creates a conversation in the Inbox, which includes the full chat transcript and any internal notes. You can follow up with the customer by email if needed. 
  2. If you've enabled the Email transcript option in Beacon (see Manage Beacon Contact Settings for more there), we’ll send the chat transcript, excluding private notes, to the customer.
No email transcript goes to the customer if the chat was never accepted by a Help Scout user. We’ll create a conversation in Help Scout so your team can follow-up via email, as you would with any other conversation in the queue. 

End a Live Chat

Choose End chat from the chat shortcut menu and you'll see a modal asking for a Summary and offering you a chance to change the status or assignment before officially ending it.


  • Anything in the Summary field becomes an internal note on the conversation.
  • BETA Plus and Pro plans can use AI Assist to help with summary note. Check out Use AI Assist in Help Scout for more information on that feature.
  • Ended chats are unassigned by default. Click on the person icon to choose to assign it to someone before ending it.  
  • The default status is set to Closed. Change it to Active or Pending by clicking on Closed before you click End Chat. 

FYI: Fine Print

  • If a chat is assigned to a User, only the assigned User can end the chat.
  • If a chat is unassigned and waiting, any User can end the chat.
  • Customers can end the chat at any time. If a customer ends the chat, you’ll see an End Chat button. Click it to get to the same modal.
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