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Your alerts are silent. Here is where to look

An address listed on My Alerts is not proof that anything can reach it. Only three types actually carry a handed-over chat today: WhatsApp, Telegram and LINE. On top of that, the business itself must have that channel connected, you must be an active member, you must be on shift, and you must be assigned to the website the customer is on. Work down the list below in order — the first failed check is almost always the whole answer.

Open My Alerts Telegram chat ID

Read this first

The failure mode nobody sees

When a customer asks for a person and there is no reachable member, the request does not queue up and it does not retry. Nobody is told at the moment it happens. The customer is first shown a message saying a team member has been notified — before we know whether that is true — and their next message gets the honest version, an offer to leave their email. Meanwhile the alert reached nobody.

This has happened in production more than once, and each time the cause was reachability, not the plan and not a bug in the widget. So treat "no alerts" as a wiring question, and check the wiring in the order below.

Check in this order

Six checks, most specific first

Did the save show an amber line?

When you add a channel on My Alerts at agents.orcalinq.com/channels, we check whether the business has a sender for it. If it does not, the row still saves and an amber message appears: "Saved, but this business has not connected [channel] yet, so alerts cannot be delivered to it. An admin needs to connect [channel] under Channels in the dashboard."

That message is the answer. Nothing can be delivered to your address until the owner connects that channel under Setup → Channels at app.orcalinq.com/channels. Alerts go out through the business's WhatsApp or Telegram account, never through your own.

The amber line only appears at the moment of saving. If you have reloaded since, add the row again to see it, or ask the owner to check the Channels page directly.

Is your channel type one that can actually deliver?

The Type dropdown offers seven options. Only three of them are wired to handed-over chats today:

Telegram — works, and is what we recommend. No delivery window, no template rules.
WhatsApp — works, with a 24-hour catch. See check 6.
LINE — works.
Web push (PWA) — does not deliver anything. It is listed, and the page describes it as a fallback, but there is no notification being sent. Do not rely on it. It is the single most misleading row on that screen.
Email, Messenger / Instagram, Custom webhook — saved but not used for handed-over chats. They will not alert you.

If your only row is Web push or Email, that is why you have never heard anything. Add Telegram.

Are you an active member?

An invitation that was pasted but never confirmed leaves you outside the team, and a removed or deactivated member is skipped. In the dashboard, the owner sees you under Account → Members & access at app.orcalinq.com/agents with a status. It has to read active.

If you never tapped Confirm join, do that first — see joining a team.

Are you on shift?

Each member can be given Working hours on their member page. Outside those hours, chats skip you entirely — no alert, no record on your phone. The account owner is never skipped, which is what makes the owner the after-hours fallback.

Working hours are evaluated in the member's own timezone if one is set, otherwise the account's. A wrong timezone is a common reason for "it works in the evening but not in the morning".

Are you assigned to the website the customer is on?

If the business runs more than one website, each member can be limited to some of them under Domain assignment. Ticking one site means you get that site's chats and no others. Leaving every box unticked means you handle all of them, which is what most people want. Owners always see all of them.

This is the check that catches out multi-site accounts: your Telegram is fine, the channel is connected, and you are on shift — but the customer was on the other site.

WhatsApp only: is the 24-hour window open?

WhatsApp lets a business send you a free-form message only within 24 hours of your last message to that business number. Your personal WhatsApp goes quiet overnight, so the window shuts and WhatsApp refuses the alert.

Two ways round it. Either message the business's WhatsApp number once to reopen the window — which you would have to do every day — or add Telegram as well. When your WhatsApp window is shut we automatically use your Telegram row instead. Accounts that have an approved WhatsApp alert template can also deliver outside the window; that template is requested for you automatically once WhatsApp is connected, but approval is Meta's decision and takes time.

Be blunt about it

What happens when an escalation reaches nobody

If every check above fails for everyone on the team, the escalation has no target. That is not a silent no-op any more — here is exactly what is raised, so you know where to look for evidence:

An alert lands in the owner's dashboard. It shows as an amber bar across the top of the dashboard. The bar gives a count, not the reason.
The reason goes to the account's email address, subject "Action needed: a customer message could not be delivered". For this case the text reads: "A visitor was escalated but nobody was notified: no member has a WhatsApp, Telegram or LINE address registered for this domain, or everyone with one is off shift." That email is the most useful artefact — read it before guessing.
Any teammate who does have a working channel is told over that channel.
A record is written on our side naming which of those surfaces were reached. When nothing at all could reach the account, it says so, so we can call.
These alerts are grouped: one per account, per cause, per hour. Three lost customers inside the same hour produce one alert. Never read one alert as one missed chat.

The customer's side of the same story — the exact words they see, and when the assistant picks the chat back up — is on the mobile inbox page.

Do not trust these signals

Three things on screen that mean less than they look

"Web push (PWA)" and the line about falling back to in-portal notification. There is no in-portal notification today: no browser notification, no sound, no pop-up. The Live Chat list refreshes itself every few seconds while the tab is open, and that is the whole of it. If the tab is not open, you learn nothing. Use Telegram.
"last seen —" next to a channel. That timestamp is only stamped in narrow situations, so a dash is normal and means nothing. It is not a health check.
The absence of a red "Broken" badge. It is set by a delivery path that is currently switched off, so in practice it will not appear even when delivery is failing. Do not read its absence as good news.

Being marked away or offline in the portal does not stop alerts. Delivery to your phone is deliberately not gated on whether you are signed in — that was an old bug and it is fixed.

Proving it works

How to test, honestly

There is no "send a test alert" button. The only real test is a real chat, and it is worth doing once before you depend on it:

Open the business's own website in a private browser window, so you are treated as a new visitor.
In the chat widget, ask for a person — for example "I want to talk to someone".
Watch the phone you registered. The alert names the customer and the website they are on, in the form [.3] priya @ example.com.
Reply in that same chat. Your reply should appear in the widget on your test window. That confirms both directions, which is the part people forget to check.
Only the first request for a person in a conversation raises an alert. Asking again in the same chat will not produce a second one, and neither will a chat already assigned to a teammate. Start a fresh private window for a second test.

If the assistant answers your request instead of handing over, the account's chat mode may not hand chats to people at all — see chat modes.

If that did not work

Still silent

Telegram, but you pasted a username. The field needs the numeric chat ID. A @handle is rejected with a message saying so. See finding your Telegram chat ID.
You added Telegram but never opened the bot chat. Telegram does not let a bot message somebody who has never started a chat with it. Open the business's bot in Telegram and send it anything once.
"Telegram is not connected for this business yet." The owner has to connect the channel first, under Setup → Channels.
The channel is connected but its health line shows a webhook error. Then no customer message reaches us at all, so no alert can be raised. The owner clicks Re-verify under Maintenance on that channel card.
Alerts arrive for one website and not another. Domain assignment — check 5.
Alerts arrive on Telegram and never on WhatsApp. Expected. That is the 24-hour window in check 6, and it is why Telegram is the recommended alert channel.
You removed a channel and alerts still went there. Deleting the row in My Alerts also removes it from delivery immediately. If you still receive something after deleting, tell us — that is a defect, not a setting.
Still stuck. Email support@orcalinq.com with three things: which channel types are listed on your My Alerts page, the website the test customer was on, and the exact text of the delivery-failure email if the owner received one. Those three answer it faster than a description of the symptom.

Add Telegram, then test with one real chat.

Telegram has no delivery window and needs no template approval. It is the one alert channel we would rely on today.

Open My Alerts Find your chat ID