In some cases, you might want to reach out to your customer via chat before they have to reach out to you. You can set up Zendesk Chat triggers that initiate a proactive chat with a customer based on specified conditions that you define. Your customer can choose whether or not to respond.
Basic plans are limited to two proactive chat triggers.
This article contains the following sections:
Considerations before using proactive chats
Before you use a proactive chat, consider the following:
- If the chat is started by a proactive trigger, the pre-chat form requirement is bypassed and chats can be created without users having to fill in their name and email address. For more information, see Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer contact information?
- A proactive trigger can bypass department routing managed by the form. For more information, see Department routing is not working correctly in chat.
Reach out to returning web visitors
Repeat customers and return web visitors are valuable to your business. To help make sure these customers are finding what they need, you can proactively reach out to them via chat to welcome them back and see if there is anything you can provide guidance with.
Set the conditions of the trigger where the visitor previous visits is greater than 0, as well as the conditions where the customer has not yet been helped by another agent or initiated a chat already themselves.
Reduce cart abandonment
As a customer, how many times have you added items to your online shopping cart, and then completely abandoned it?
To provide customers that extra push to purchase, you can set up a trigger to initiate a proactive chat when a customer is on your shopping cart page URL for a specific length of time, more than 60 seconds, for example. You can send them a personalized message to see if they have any questions about the items in their cart.
Answer questions on critical webpages
Similar to the previous shopping cart example, there may be some critical pages on your website or Help Center that you would want to provide customers with an extra level of support by reaching out to them.
One example would be when a prospect is on your pricing page and evaluating which plan or product to select. You can intiate a proactive chat to provide guidance they might need.
18 Comments
We have started using these proactive chats quite a bit. However there doesn't appear to be a way where we can prompt the customer to give us their name and email address so they just get known as "Visitor 1499859311" which is not very good when they are your key contacts Any ideas how we can get round this issue.
Would the trigger only fire during business hours?
Hi Jessica,
The Schedule functionality (that can be used to set up business hours) will not allow agents to set themselves as Online outside of business hours. As a consequence, the widget will not be in the active state and the proactive trigger will not be applied.
Can I hyperlink text in the initial chat message?
I agree with Jennnifer. Is there a way to capture the customer's name and email if a trigger has been sent?
@Annette if you enter a URL, it should automatically get hyperlinked in the widget.
@Jose there is no way to present the pre-chat form to collect that information when a trigger fires. One solution customers have done is send two messages in the trigger, the second asking them for their name and email address. Then, the agent can fill the information out for the visitor.
@Ramin it would be extremely useful if we could get the pre-chat form to still be required even if a trigger initiates an outbound chat in order to require the user to input their identifying info (name, email address). I view this as a rather important option that you should offer. The chat-initiating triggers are of little use to us otherwise, and we'd really like to use them!
Hi,
I agree with Ferdi (I know, I joined this conversation 5 months late) that triggers should be able to:
@Ramin I love the idea of using more the proactive chats. But yeah, it's important that we know their email. In my case, users are authenticated already, therefore we know their email for example. Would it make sense if we update automatically their email (and other information we have) so that proactive chat would not be blind? If yes, how should it be done? What API, What endpoint? Can this kind of integration be done from the front end, with Google Tag Manager? Is it safe. I am already using it for the Zendesk snippet tag. Thank You
If they are authenticated in your website already, you can look at using authenticated visitors to pre-fill the information for the visitor: https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001771347-Conversation-history-authenticated-visitors-in-Chat-widget
This will mean triggers will fire and you will still have the visitor information. It should be fine using Google Tag Manager, you just need to ensure the API is fired on every page change.
Since you are using the Web Widget, you will need to be in the new integrated chat experience EAP. You can sign up for it here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000879927-Start-Here-Web-Widget-Integrated-Chat-Experience-Early-Access-Program-EAP-
Is it possible to proactively chat with customers who have previously purchased from our website and then returned to the site again?
Hi Justin,
Currently, Chat triggers are not built to support that use case. Zendesk has another product called Connect which is designed better for that type of proactive messaging based on past purchases.
You can learn more about the Connect product here: https://www.zendesk.com/connect/
-Ramin
Hi,
Is there any way by which we can implement same functionality on android chat sdk? As far as i can see i could not find any function exposed by zendesk to support proactive chat
Vivek
Hi Vivek,
Chat SDK does not allow for any action before the customer initiates a chat. In this case, sending a proactive chat to your visitor is not possible through mobile apps.
I've been trying to troubleshoot this with Chat Support for a few weeks to no avail. We have agents in different Departments; and as such, they are restricted to only seeing chats in their respective Departments.
One would think you could apply the Department through the Proactive Triggers, but this works for firing other Triggers and Rules, but DOES NOT update the Visitor Department on the Visitors UI; so the Department restricted Agents do not see these Visitors.
The only way Departments are updated and become visible on the Visitor UI is AFTER the visitor manually responds and submits something via the chat console.
Has anyone else had this issue or know a way to resolve it?
Thanks Much!
Ben
Hi there Team ZenDesk
I was wondering if there is a way to notify an agent when a proactive chat has been fired?
We have a number of proactive chat triggers that are set up, but if the customer doesn't start the chat nothing happens.
We would like to see when the message is been fired, in this way an agent can start the conversation.
Thanks for your help.
Lance
Hi Lance,
The best solution I can recommend is applying a tag to visitors when a trigger fires and then search for that tag on the visitor list.
You will then get a dynamic list of people who met the conditions and the tag got applied during their session.
Hope that helps,
Ramin
We have initiated the pricing page trigger, which is working as expected. However, the pricing page lingo stays active even after the user navigates away from the pricing page. Is there a way to turn off this trigger once the user navigates away from the pricing page?
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