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.
Identifying when to use proactive chats
Reaching 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's 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.
Reducing 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.
Answering 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 initiate a proactive chat to provide the guidance they might need.
19 comments
Greg Wilhelm
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?
1
Alex Owens
Hi, I am new here, Just want to ask that, is there any option in zendesk chat that. new visitor alert without clicking zendesk chat widget.
Thanks
0
Cheeny Aban
Hi James,
Unfortunately, proactive chat trigger will on fire on three instances; when the visitor loaded the chat widget; when the visitor requested a chat; and when a chat message is sent. As of the moment, there is no native way to fire proactive chats without clicking the widget.
I hope that helps!
0
Brandon Geick
Can I use the Visitor Tags option to target my users who have defined user tags ?
0
Josh
Thanks for messaging us. Yes you can definitely use tag to target visitors who has those tags. You can follow this article for more information: Setting up tags
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Dane
Yes, this is available for Agent Workspace as long as you have not enabled Messaging.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Dane
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Amanda Lynn
When it comes to the "client has loaded the chat" does that mean physically clicking on the chat and there is no way to trigger the bot to say something if someone does not click on the bot? We would like to offer support when someone is stuck on the pricing page for X amount of time without them actually clicking on the help chat. Is this possible?
0
DJ Buenavista Jr.
The "client has loaded the chat" means that the trigger runs when the chat widget appears on the page, but the visitor has not interacted with it. You can check our article, Zendesk Chat triggers conditions and actions reference for more information about chat trigger conditions and actions.
In your case, you can use the condition "Still on page" as shown in this article, "Reduce cart abandonment" example for your reference. This will send a message to the end-user depending on the number of seconds you put in the condition.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
0
ZDAdmin
Hi
Is is possible for an agent to initiate a chat, even if the web site users has not clicked anything. I don't want a trigger to start it, but rather an agent ?
Thanks
Parisch Browne
0
DJ Buenavista Jr.
Unfortunately, this is not possible. The only way for an end-user to get initiated without clicking or doing anything is thru pro-active chat. Agents cannot pro-actively chat customers, they can only start chatting with a customer once they initiated a chat through the web widget.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
0
Julian
Is it possible to use this function also without an agent is online, so we can keep the function in offline mode but customers can email us instead?
0
Brett Bowser
I believe there's a chat trigger condition for "department status = offline" that you should be able to use when creating your trigger. I'd recommend taking a look at this article for more information: Zendesk Chat triggers conditions and actions reference
I hope this helps!
1
Nikki
For
does this consider every single part of the URL? Or only the base part?
Example:
https://qademo.timestudy.co/Admin/AccessRights.aspx?id=45#step=5
Can I trigger a proactive chat based on either "Admin" or "AccessRights" or "step=5" ?
Can I trigger based on "AccessRights.aspx" and have it NOT trigger at the URL containing "AccessRightsTest" ?
Thanks!
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Nikki
The condition "Visitor Page URL contains" does affect the whole URL. So yes, you can create a proactive chat based on those keywords.
0
Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Hi!
With shortcuts you can create questions messages with options for the customer as below:
My question is how to write into the trigger script to be able to send the same kind of messages to the customer because it is not proposed:
Best regards,
Raphael
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Dane
The "Options" in shortcuts is not available for Chat triggers.
-1
Mikael H
Hi
We are using a pre-chat form to collect name and email-address. When using proactive chats (triggered if a customer is on a product page for longer than 2 mins) saying "Hi, is there anything we can help you with", the customer skips the pre-chat form.
Is it possible to make it so that the customer still needs to fill in name and email address to chat with us, even if the proactive chat trigger fired?
Thanks
0
Aishat G.
Hi,
Does this work with the mobile application chat?
If we install the Zendesk live chat in our mobile app, can we target proactively the user through that channel?
Regards
0
Ivan Miquiabas
Thanks for reaching out!
If you are referring to Chat Mobile SDK, Yes it does work, although with some limitation. When a customer visits your mobile app with a Chat mobile SDK installed, Zendesk Chat recognizes the page title as Mobile chat connected. This can be used as a condition for all Chat triggers to fire only for mobile app users.
Please check the details on this article to know more.
Cheers!
0