How can I troubleshoot common Chat trigger issues?

Zendesk Chat triggers enable you to send proactive messages, set a department, and even add tags to your visitors. By default, there are pre-formatted triggers on your account to get you started. To see a list of preformatted triggers, go to Settings > Triggers.

Below are some troubleshooting steps for common Chat trigger issues and ways to resolve them.

My visitors do not receive the proactive message
Working with proactive messages

Are you online?

Triggers work when at least one of your agents is online. You cannot create a trigger that sends a message when your agents are offline. 

To set your availability, see the article: Configuring your chat availability settings.

Using the right trigger conditions

• Run trigger conditions

The Run trigger conditions are the base condition set when to run your triggers. For more information about the three options for Run trigger, see the article: Working with Chat triggers.

For proactive messages, use When a visitor has loaded the chat widget. 

Set When a visitor has loaded the chat widget to ensure that the trigger runs the moment your web page loads in the visitor's browser.

• Still on page and Still on site

The order placement of the time conditions affects how the trigger behaves. When testing triggers with time conditions, use the incognito mode or a private browser to ensure cookies don't affect your test. 

My proactive message doesn't appear on mobile
How do triggers behave on mobile browsers and mobile applications

Proactive messages on mobile browsers do not open the chat window as desktop browsers do.

For Chats embedded on mobile apps via the mobile SDK's, proactive triggers do not pop up because the chat session does not initiate unless you click on the chat within the app. 

I added a visitor URL condition but the trigger doesn't work
How to target visitors on specific pages

You can target key visitors that are on specific pages of your site with the Visitor page URL condition. It is important to distinguish which operator works well for your campaign.

• The Equals operator reads the exact URL of the page. For example, if you want to target customers on the homepage https://www.zendesk.com/ and not the other pages, the format looks like this:

• The Contains operator allows you to check keywords or phrases in the URL without looking at the whole URL link for the page. For example, you want to target visitors on all pages with the word pricing in the URL, the format looks like this:

         Visitors that go to zendesk.com/pricing and or zendesk.com/explore/pricing get a trigger.

• You can also use the Regex operator. An example is to target users on multiple pages that do not have a common phrase or word in the URL. For more information on how to use regex for Visitor URL, see the article: Recipe: Route a chat to a department based on the URL of the website.

For one-pager websites and desktop applications

Triggers with Visitor URL conditions don't work with one-pager websites because it does not identify the change in the page when the visitor loads the section. Use update path API to identify these changes as end-users navigate through the sections of your website. 

I created a trigger to set a department but it does not set
Why the order of conditions and actions matter

The system reads and acts on trigger conditions and actions from the top to the bottom of the list. Some actions should happen first before another action can take place.

Setting a department using triggers must come as the first action before Send message to visitor action is set. When Send message to visitor is set as the first action on the list, the trigger ignores the Set visitor department action.

The email address on the proactive message does not show correctly
How to use proper syntax for email addresses

For the trigger actions, the at-sign '@' is used as a placeholder. To add an email address on Send Message to visitor, Replace note, Set name of Visitor, and Append, add an extra @ symbol. For example, [e-mail] should be entered as user@@domain.com.

Furthermore, your trigger does not work if the at sign '@' is part of the agent name as shown below.

For more information about Chat trigger placeholders, see the article: Trigger placeholders.

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