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

Question

We have enabled the pre-chat form and it is a requirement that every end user 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.

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 When do chats time out?.