Attendees don't always stay in the room long enough to get a live answer, and your moderators aren't always at their desks. eWebinar has a few built-in mechanisms that make sure those conversations still get closed out. Some are plain Chat-tab settings; one (a single inbox across every webinar you run) is a paid add-on.
Replies are delivered by email when the attendee is offline
When a moderator sends a message to an attendee who has already left the session, the reply goes out by email from chat@ewebinar.com. The sender name shown is the primary moderator's name + "via eWebinar", so it reads as a direct reply even though it is delivered through our infrastructure.
If the attendee replies to that email, the reply lands in the primary moderator's email inbox by default. You can change that destination per webinar — see the next section.
Route offline replies to a shared inbox (Set reply-to email)
In Chat tab → Moderators, turn on Set reply-to email address when attendees are offline and enter the address you want attendee replies to land in. Useful when you want to:
- Keep an individual moderator's personal email hidden from attendees.
- Route replies to a shared queue like
support@yourcompany.comorsales@yourcompany.comso a whole team can pick them up.
Leave it off if you want a single accountable owner — the primary moderator — to receive every offline reply.
Failsafe: email summary when no moderator responds
In the same section, the Email summary of chat conversation if moderator does not respond setting is your "nothing slips through" net. When it's on, if an attendee sends messages during a session but no moderator ever replies, a summary of their messages is emailed to a designated address fifteen minutes after the attendee leaves (or the webinar ends).
Typically that address is a Team Lead, Manager, or Support alias, so someone is accountable for following up even when live coverage is missed.
Shared moderator account for a whole support team
If you want an entire support team (not just one or two people) to be able to answer chat, you can invite a single team member with the Moderator role using a centralized login email such as support@yourcompany.com, then share that account's credentials with the group who monitors that inbox. Anyone on the team can then log in and respond to new-message notifications.
This is a setup pattern, not a separate feature — and it does mean sharing login credentials. If you prefer not to share credentials, add each person individually as a Moderator instead; they will all be notified of new messages and whoever replies first "owns" the conversation.
AI chat handoff to a human moderator
If you use the Chatbase integration (or the generic Chatbot API) to auto-answer attendee questions, the bot can hand a conversation off to a human moderator. This is controlled by the disableReachHuman setting — when off (the default), attendees see a "Connect with a person" option in the chat panel, and the bot will escalate the conversation when asked.
Pair this with the reply-to and email-summary settings above so handoffs still get a response even if the attendee has already moved on by the time a human is available.
One inbox across every webinar (Universal Dashboard add-on)
This is a paid subscription add-on, not a built-in feature. Accounts without the add-on moderate chat per-webinar from each webinar's dashboard.
If you run more than one eWebinar and want your moderators to work out of a single pane instead of jumping between webinar dashboards, the Universal Dashboard add-on lets moderators respond to chat from a single inbox for all of their assigned webinars. It also consolidates registrants by unique email so you get a single registrant record across every webinar they've attended.
See the Universal Dashboard FAQ for pricing, the 7-day free trial, and how to enable it (you need at least two published webinars).