Question
How do I send a message to a customer that has been on the same page for a certain amount of time? 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.
See the example below of a proactive trigger that will send a welcome message to customers after 30 seconds.
- From the Chat dashboard, select Settings > Triggers and then Add trigger.
- Enter a name and brief description for your trigger and select Enabled at the top to enable your trigger.
- If the trigger should fire only once per individual, select the Each visitor will receive this message only once checkbox. Deselect this box if you want the trigger to fire every time an individual meets the trigger conditions.
- In the Customize trigger section, use the Run trigger drop-down to select When a visitor has loaded the chat widget if you want the trigger to run when the visitor has loaded the widget.
- In Check conditions select Check all of the following conditions.
- Select the conditions below.
- Still on site | {time}
- 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} | {enter welcome message}
- Click Create triggers.
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.
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