Announcements
For whoever is running the desk.
Notices for clients (an outage, maintenance, a holiday closure) shown in the places clients already are, without emailing anybody.
What one looks like
A title, Markdown details (bold, italic, links, lists; raw HTML is stripped), and a level: info, warning or urgent. Optionally a button with a label and a link, a start time and an expiry, and whether it can be dismissed.
Where it appears
Tick the placements:
- Every page of a connected site: a sticky bar at the top, drawn by the same snippet that draws the chat widget.
- The ticket area: above the client’s ticket pages.
- The chat widget: above the conversation.
- The new-ticket form: where it stops the ticket being opened at all.
And optionally only on some of the brand’s sites, chosen by origin.
Who sees it
Three audiences: everyone, signed-in clients only, or clients with an open ticket. The last is the one people forget exists, and it is the right answer for “we know about the outage, stop writing in”.
Dismissals
If an announcement can be closed, closing it is remembered in that browser, and on the account for a signed-in client, so it stays closed on their phone too. Editing the title or details (or pressing Reset dismissals) bumps its version so it comes back.
Several at once
Several can run together; the most pressing is shown first. The live list is cached for a minute per brand, so an expiry takes effect everywhere within a minute.
Where else they turn up
Live announcements are given to the chat assistant and to AI reply drafts as current context, so neither cheerfully tells somebody everything is fine during an outage. That alone justifies writing one.
Incidents write their own
An incident keeps its own announcement in step automatically, one per incident, level set by impact, a “View status” button where a status page address is set, and it stays up for a configurable window after resolution. Do not write those by hand.
Advice
- Say when it will be fixed, or when you will next say something. “We are investigating” with no second sentence generates the tickets it was meant to prevent.
- Set an expiry. The announcement everybody stopped reading in March is worse than none.
- Use the new-ticket form placement for the ones meant to stop contact, and the page bar for the ones meant to inform.