Question
How do I initiate a live chat with someone on my website? Can I start a chat with a welcome message as soon as a user visits my website?
Answer
You are able to proactively send a chat to your customers after a specified amount of time. Initiate a proactive chat with customers visiting your website. Add a time condition to specify when the trigger will fire and your customers will receive a welcome message.
The example in this article fires a proactive trigger that sends a welcome message to customers after 30 seconds.
To create this trigger
- Add a new trigger.
- If the trigger should fire only once per individual, select the Each visitor will receive this message only once checkbox.
- In the Customize trigger section, select:
- Channel | Chat
- Run trigger | When a visitor has loaded the chat widget
- Check conditions | Check all of the following conditions:
- Still on site | 30
- Visitor previous visits | Equals | 0
- Visitor requesting chat | Is false
- Visitor served | Is false
- Select the actions under Perform the following actions.
- Send message to visitor | Name of agent | Message
- Send message to visitor | Name of agent | Message
- Select Create triggers.
See below an animation that exemplifies how the proactive trigger looks to your customers.
Alternatively, reach out to your customers using the Visitors tab of your live chat account. For more information, see this article: Browsing your site's visitors.
5 Comments
Hello,
Is there a way this can work with the customer being idle on the page? I've been testing this feature and the only way it works is if they click on the widget and the message populates after the time period set up in the trigger.
Thank you
Thanks for reaching out to us with your question. I'm happy to help. It sounds like you want the web widget to open automatically when a visitor has been idle on a page for a certain amount of time. You want this to happen based on how long the customer has been idle. Is that correct? Looking forward to your response.
Best,
Hi Amanda,
Yes exactly, I have been testing this on our system and can only get this to work once the widget has been actively clicked on. I would like it to create a pop-up message on the widget while the customer is scrolling on a certain page. The triggers noted above don't seem to mirror this outcome.
Thank you
Although the ability to edit this function is outside of Zendesk's native features, it is possible to achieve with some customization work using some code to modify the HTML. The Core API section from our developer documentation for the Web Widget (Classic) API provides the JavaScript API for forcing the Web Widget to open. That document also contains complete API settings and commands for other advanced customizations for the Web Widget.
I hope this helps!
My apologies, I need to make a correction. It looks like I gave you the wrong information in my reply. You asked how to proactively load the chat widget when a visitor has been idle on your page. You can actually do this in a simpler way. This article will give complete details on how to set the trigger to load the chat widget after a certain amount of time. For quick reference, below is a snippet from that article of how your trigger should be set up.
Please sign in to leave a comment.