Live Chat with AWRA Support

Live chat connects you with an AWRA support representative, a person on the AWRA team, from two places. Signed in, open the chat drawer in the app; on the public website, open the AwraIQ assistant panel. When at least one representative is online, a bar reads “Chat live with AWRA support — A representative is online now” with a Start chat button. Type what you need help with in What can we help with? and click Start live chat. When nobody is online the bar is not shown at all, and the drawer and the assistant offer the ordinary send-a-message form instead, which support answers by email.

Signed in, you do not type your name or email: the chat is opened as you, under your organization, and you can hold one open chat at a time — pressing Start again adds your message to the chat you already have rather than queueing you twice. Closing the drawer or moving to another page does not lose the conversation; reopening picks it up. On the public website a visitor gives a name and an email, because that address is where any follow-up goes, and there is an optional box for AWRA’s monthly email which is never ticked for you. Each message can be up to 2,000 characters.

In practice: a stores supervisor in Eldoret cannot find where to set a reorder level on an item. She opens the chat drawer, sees that a representative is online, clicks Start chat and writes “Where do I set a reorder level for one warehouse only?”. A line appears saying a representative from AWRA support joined the chat, the answer arrives a few seconds later, and she keeps working in the same tab with the chat open beside her. The chat window updates by itself every few seconds, so there is nothing to refresh.

A chat starts as Connecting while it waits for a representative. Support is alerted straight away, and by default the alert widens to the whole support team if nobody answers within the first minute and reaches the support inbox by email after two. A representative who opens your chat and replies has taken it, and a second representative cannot take the same chat from them. A line in the chat tells you when someone has joined, using their first name.

If nobody accepts within three minutes, the chat is closed as missed and nothing is lost. A final line tells you that no one from support could pick this up just now and that the reply will come by email to the address on the chat. A chat started in the app becomes a message in AWRA’s support inbox, carrying everything you wrote and a link to any file you shared; a chat started on the website becomes a support request with your name, email, the page you were on and your conversation with the assistant. Either way the answer arrives as an email.

In practice: an accountant in Kampala starts a chat at 7 p.m. about a supplier bill posting to the wrong account, just as the last representative is stepping away. After three minutes the chat window says no one could pick it up and that support will reply by email. She closes the tab. The next morning the reply is in her inbox, written by someone who could already read her question and the screenshot she attached. A chat that someone did answer closes itself after 30 minutes with no new messages, and either side can end it sooner.

You can attach files with the paperclip once the chat is open: images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP), PDF, plain text and CSV, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Each file can be up to 10 MB, you can send up to five at once, and a burst of more than twenty files in ten minutes is refused for a few minutes. Files are stored privately under a random name, never under the name you gave them, and the link shown in the chat is a signed link that stops working after an hour; reopening the chat issues a fresh one.

When a chat that a representative answered ends, a copy of the whole conversation is emailed to you with the AWRA support inbox on copy. Files you shared travel inside that email as attachments up to 15 MB in total; anything over that is sent as a download link that lasts 30 days. A chat you cancel while it is still connecting has nothing in it worth sending, so it produces no transcript. If the chat was missed, the email follow-up already carries your message and links to your files.

A representative sees your name and email, the page you started from, your organization’s name for a signed-in chat, and, when you started from the website assistant, the last few turns of that assistant conversation so you do not have to repeat yourself. For a website chat the address you connected from is recorded too. What you type and attach is what support has: never paste a password, a one-time code or a full card number into a chat, and crop screenshots of payslips or bank details to the part that shows the problem. Live chat runs in the browser on the web app and the public site.