How do I customize the pre-chat form?

Question

What information can I collect about my customers on the pre-chat form? How do I customize the pre-chat form and change what my customers see?

Answer

The pre-chat form can be used to collect information about your customers before a live chat session is initiated. This is a feature of live chat and requires one of these widgets: 

• Web widget (Classic)
• Chat-only web widget
• Legacy Chat widget

Not sure which widget you're using? See the article Which Zendesk widget do I have with my account and website?

Note: This feature is not available with messaging. For information on messaging, see the article: About messaging.

You can edit the pre-chat form from the Chat dashboard under Settings > Widget > Forms > Pre-chat form. For information on activating your form, see the article: Enabling the pre-chat form on the Chat widget.

You can add, remove, and customize 5 elements on the form

Browse the tabs below for more information on customizing these elements:

Greeting

Identity

Phone number

Department

Question

Greeting

The greeting is the message that will appear at the top of your form. Use this to provide instructions or to welcome your customer to chat. The greeting field cannot process HTML elements such as hyperlinks and should only contain plain text. 

Identity 

The identity fields collect personal information about your customers. By default, this will include a Name and Email field. You can choose to allow your customers to use either a Facebook or Google account to populate these fields for them. To add these features, select the options next to Allow social login under the Visitor profile.

If you want to collect your customer's information automatically, use the Chat API. For more information, see the article: How to identify visitors in the Chat widget?

If you do not wish to collect your customer's name and email on the pre-chat form. Toggle Vistor profile off.

Selecting this option removes both fields from your form. Disabling this means there will be no record of your customer's name or email in the chat history so you will not be able to follow up with them after the chat session ends. 

Phone number

To create a phone number field, select the option Allow phone number under the Visitor Profile section.

This creates an optional phone number field on the form. To make this a required field, select Require phone number under the Pre-Chat form.

Department

If you have departments set up in Chat then this field will automatically show up on the pre-chat form. Choose to make this field required and customize the field label under Pre-chat form.

To add more options to this field, see the article: How do I add departments to the pre-chat form?

If you want to keep your chat departments but do not want this field to appear on your widget, see the article: Can I hide the department field on the pre-chat form?

Question

The question field is added automatically, where your customers will type their first message. The field is labeled Message on the form and this label is not customizable. Require this field by selecting Require question under the Pre-Chat form.

There are no other customization options in the pre-chat form. If you need to collect additional information or you want to customize the form beyond this you need to create a completely custom chat widget. For more information about this, see the article: Can I add additional fields to my pre-chat form?

Having trouble with your form?

If you are experiencing issues with your pre-chat form, see the following articles for more help:

• How do I ensure the pre-chat form is presented to a visitor if they time out and then reconnect?
• Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer email or phone number?