When to use a time condition or action for Chat triggers

Question

There are conditions and actions that include a time delay in my Zendesk Chat triggers. When should I use these time conditions and an action?

Answer

Triggers contain both a time condition and a time delay action that you can use to create your triggers. Listed below are some examples of when to use a time condition or a time delay action in your trigger.

Time conditions (Still on site and Still on page)

• When you want to check how long the visitor is on your site or page before sending a message.
• When you want to set a delay before the next condition is checked. A chat rescuer is an example.

Time condition is used to perform an action only if the trigger condition remains true for a certain amount of time. It ensures that the trigger does not run if anything about the situation changes during the time delay and no longer matches your next trigger conditions. For more information on how the time conditions work, see the article: How do time conditions work with Chat triggers?

Time action delay (wait)

• Do many actions in order, with a time delay in between them.
• Send multiple messages in paragraphs that are contained in each chat bubble.

The wait action does not check back the trigger conditions you set. Generally, this means you only want to use a time action in situations where you don't care if conditions remain true or not, like if you create a trigger to tag all chats that have been active for more than 5 minutes no matter what. You can also use time actions to include a pause between a string of trigger actions as described in this article: Can I add a pause between messages sent by a single Chat trigger?