Question
We enabled the pre-chat form and require customer contact information. However, sometimes we see a chat from a customer and there is no name or contact info, just Visitor 123456
. Why do I keep receiving these chats?
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 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?