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Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer contact information?

Rachel A
  • Edited

Question

We enabled the pre-chat form and it is a requirement that every customer fills it in before they can start a chat with us. However, sometimes we see a chat from a customer and there is no name or contact info, just Visitor 123456. How are these users getting past our pre-chat form?

Answer 

If a chat is manually requested by the visitor, they are required to fill in your pre-chat form. If the chat is started by a proactive trigger, the pre-chat form requirement is bypassed. The customer is placed in the queue to be served when they reply to the message sent by the trigger, without having to enter their contact information in the pre-chat form.

You can identify these chats by looking at the first message in the transcript. That message is not from the end user as expected, but from a proactive trigger instead. In some cases, if the end user replies to an expired chat session created by a proactive trigger, a new chat is created without the visitor's name and email address. For these cases, there isn't the information that the proactive trigger has fired previously, and the first message shows as made by the customer.

Another instance where this can occur is when the visitor's session to Chat times out but the window or tab does not close. If the customer reconnects to the widget to send a new message, the pre-chat form will not automatically be presented to the visitor.

For more information on how to avoid the latter scenario, see this article: How do I ensure the pre-chat form is presented to a visitor if they time out then reconnect?

Note: Only the end user can terminate a chat session. Ending a chat by an agent doesn't end the session unless you are using the Chat Mobile SDK. For more information, see the article: When do chats time out?
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13 Comments

  • Dan Scott

    Is there a way of doing reach out chat via trigger, yet still requiring them to fill in the contact form if they respond?

    4
  • Rachel A
    • Edited

    Hi Dan! Other than actually having the agent ask the user to fill in their information, there isn't currently a way to make a customer to fill in their information after they respond to a proactive Chat trigger, as it bypasses the pre-chat form requirement. It does sound like it could be an interesting feature development though, so I would advise creating a product feedback request over here! :) 

    1
  • Dan Scott

    Will do, thanks Rachel! 

    1
  • Adedayo Oduneye

    Hi Rachel, I’m also experiencing the same issue as Dan. My company uses the legacy Zopim Chat. Could you please let us know when this feature can be added on the platform. I have integrated a CHATBOT with the platform and I want to achieve same outcome as Dan.

    0
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Adedayo,

    It looks like there's already a feedback post created for this feature: Proactive Greeting with Pre Chat Form

    I recommend upvoting the post and providing your use-case for our Product Managers to view :) 

    Thanks again for taking the time to share this with us!

    0
  • Ritika Joshi

    I have enabled chat in my product as well as in my website also but at the same time I want to restrict the visitors on my product to not fill the chat form and they can direct ask anything or go for the search they want but if any visitor come from the website then they must need to fill the entries.

    For this, I turn off the Pre-Chat form and The Visitor Profile for the chat so they won't be asked with the name and other details before requesting a chat. But, the form is disabled from the website and product also. 

    So, please can you help me out to restrict visitors from the path I want?

     

    0
  • Devan - Community Manager
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hello Ritika,

    This won't work without the Pre-Chat form enabled. What I suggest is turning it back on and prefill the information for users who are already signed in. Then use a trigger to chat with customers proactively for signed-in users by identifying a tag they can add after the user has signed in. That way, they won't see the pre-chat form anymore.

    Best regards.

    0
  • Gabriel Vinicius Batista

    Pre-chat doesn't work when user is acessing it by app, it's just ignored and start our chat...

    But when user acess our Pre-Chat by web, it works normally

    Why this is happen?

    0
  • Ben Van Iten
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Gabriel,

    My apologies for the delay. When you say accessing it by an app, could you provide some more detail about that app and how users are accessing the form? 

    Also, just to confirm, you have the pre chat form enabled and identification required per this page? 

    https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022367293-Enabling-the-pre-chat-form

    Thanks! 

    0
  • Gatis Bertmanis

    Any news? We don't have any triggers, and in events, it's shown that the end-user started a conversation.

    But still, there are cases when the end-user shows as a visitor, despite that name and e-mail are required to enter, before chatting starts.

    0
  • DJ Buenavista Jr.
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hi Gatis,

    Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.

    In regards to your concern, I was able to check your Help Center and I tried to start a chat without inputting any name and email, information but it didn't let me start a live chat session.

    I would advise double-checking your Chat triggers if you have a chat pro-active trigger enabled, if so that would bypass your pre-chat form rules.

    Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!

    Kind regards,

    DJ Buenavista Jr. |
    Customer Advocacy Specialist | Support@Zendesk.com

    0
  • Maoqin Xie
    • Edited

    I have embedded the code on my website and it worked as expected. But I am wondering pre-fill the pre-chat form if the user logged in. What should I do? The below code is not working in react js. 

    <script type="text/javascript">
zESettings = {
  webWidget: {
    contactForm: {
      fields: [
        { id: 'description', prefill: { '*': 'This is prefilled description text' } }
      ]
    }
  }
};
</script>
    0
  • JJ
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hello Maoqin Xie,

    Please note that you would have to check if actually the contact form in the Web Widget Form was turned on and you are using that one in your widget.

    For example:

    For more info:

    Using Web Widget to embed customer service in your website

    Only then it will work correctly, as in the example below:

    Most of the time the issue is that clients are not using the correct widget contact form.

    You can also test it out in Codepen.io first to see if your widget script and zeSettings script is correctly rendering in the test window as I did above.

    Regarding React.js itself, Zendesk cannot troubleshoot the framework itself, but in your place, I would check how React is rendering the JSX into vanilla HTML/JS when it is compiled.

    Check in the inspect window if you are seeing what you would see if you would use vanilla HTML/JS.

    Hope that helps!

    0

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