Prospects and incidents arrive through the same window
An MSP website gets two very different chats: a business evaluating whether to move their IT to you, and an existing client whose email has stopped working. Both are urgent to the person typing, but they need entirely different handling — and the second one, handled casually, quietly becomes an unmanaged support channel that bypasses your ticketing and your SLAs.
Decide deliberately what chat is for
The most common mistake is letting chat become a shadow helpdesk. A clear position works better: chat triages and routes, but incidents become tickets. That keeps the audit trail intact, keeps response times measurable, and stops work being done in a window that nobody can report on afterwards.
Triage well and the ticket starts warm
The few facts that matter early — which client, which system, how many people affected, when it started, whether there is a workaround — are exactly what chat is good at collecting. Capturing them up front means the engineer who picks up the ticket starts with context instead of a round of clarifying questions.
Separate sales from service
A prospect comparing providers and a client reporting an outage should not share a queue. Departments route them apart so an evaluation conversation is not stuck behind an incident, and so your engineers are not interrupted by procurement questions.
Do not do authentication in an open chat
Support conversations drift toward credentials fast — someone will offer a password to be helpful. Agents should never accept them in chat, and should move identity verification to your established process. Saying so plainly in the conversation is good practice and reassures a security-conscious client rather than alarming them.
How MyLiveChat fits
MyLiveChat is free forever for one agent and includes a built-in ticketing side, so a chat that turns out to be an incident can become a tracked ticket rather than vanishing into a transcript. Departments split sales from service, and transcripts carry the triage detail into the ticket so nothing is asked twice.