Offline messaging on SMS and IM gateways

Offline messages just became enabled on gateways. This means that now, you'll receive messages sent by patrons who message your gateways when your queues are offline. You'll get these messages the next time an operator assigned to that queue signs in. This is especially important for the SMS gateway, since patrons texting you may not know your status, and since texting is more asychronous-communications friendly.

If you'd like to test our our SMS gateway, please let us know. We can temporarily add our G1's phone number to one of your queues as a gateway so you can see it in action.

Offline messages are also enabled for IM gateways. Most IM patrons won't message you when you're offline since your presence is plainly obvious, but if they do, you can reply now. If they happen to have gone offline in the meantime, they'll get your message when they return online.

Offline messages are *not* turned on for widget chats. Past experience with widgets that provide offline messaging led us to this. Patrons that chat an offline widget will navigate away before you reply in nearly all cases, so there is no reliable way to reply back to them. They almost never leave contact information. Patrons viewing your offline widgets will see "Chat is offline" and so typically won't chat. If they try anyway, they'll get "Chat is offline" in response to their first message. And if you're using the presence API to hide your widget when it's offline, patrons typically won't see your offline widgets anyway.

Enjoy!