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.
9 Comments
Is there a way of doing reach out chat via trigger, yet still requiring them to fill in the contact form if they respond?
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! :)
Will do, thanks Rachel!
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
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!
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