Live now and watching a visitor

Live now lists everyone on your sites at this moment and is where live help starts: message someone, call them, watch their tab, or ask to help on their screen. Seeing the list needs the See people and who is online permission.

The Live now page

Across the top: Online now (seen in the last 2 minutes), Identified, In a conversation and First visit. Below, one row per visitor:

• Visitor: their name or email when known, otherwise "Anonymous" and which visit this is.
• Current page, On site (time this visit), and Device with their location.
• Status: In conversation, Snoozed chat or Browsing. Instant means their page holds a live connection, so a message you send appears at once.

Narrow the list with Page, name or email contains…, a traffic source, or Identified only. Click a row to see that visitor's sessions.

The Live event stream beside the list shows page views, clicks and your custom events as they happen. Pause freezes it while you read. For anonymous visitors it shows page views only: their other events reach coview once they identify.

How fresh it is

• Visitors appear a few seconds after they open a page with the snippet.
• Each open page checks in every 30 seconds, and every 10 seconds while someone on your team is online.
• A page in a background tab doesn't check in, and a visitor leaves the list 2 minutes after their last check-in.

Act on a visitor

Each row has buttons for what your role may do:

• Message: write first. Choose Show as a bubble (a preview next to the chat button) or Open the chat window. See Answer chats in the inbox.
• Call: it rings on their screen. See Voice and video calls.
• Watch live: their tab, live. See below.
• Request control (or Point & draw, if your role may only draw): watch live and ask at once to help on their screen. See Show me and Take over.

Watch a visitor live

Click Watch live in Live now, on a customer's profile, or on a recording that is still going on. In the inbox, the conversation's Co-browse tab shows the visitor's tab beside the chat. Watching needs the Watch session recordings and people live permission.

Their tab fills your window, a second or two behind what they see. Beside it are three tabs: Chat (their conversation), Browser (errors, warnings and failed requests from their browser as they happen) and About (who they are, their location, device and visit). The back arrow returns to where you came from.

The status line says how it's going:

Status	Meaning
Connecting…	Their page is picking up the request: at once if it holds a live connection, otherwise with its next action, within 10 to 30 seconds.
N s behind	Live. N is how far behind their screen you are.
No activity for …	Live, but nothing has changed on their page.
Reconnecting…	Catching up with the page as it is now.
Not recording	Nothing arrived from them in the last 30 minutes.

"This visitor isn't being recorded" usually means they declined analytics, are outside your recording sample, are on a page you excluded, or are idle. coview keeps checking while the view is open, and Try again asks once more. See Privacy, masking and retention.

Is watching visible to the visitor?

No. Watching shows what the session recording already shows, with the same masking, and nothing you do while watching reaches their page. Each time someone starts watching, it is written to the audit log.

If you want visitors to approve even a silent view, turn on Ask before watching in Settings › Co-browsing. The visitor then sees "Support would like to see this tab" and chooses Let them see or Deny; their yes lasts for the rest of the visit in that tab.