In some cases, you might want to reach out to your customer via chat before they have to reach out to you. You can set up Zendesk Chat triggers that initiate a proactive chat with a customer based on specified conditions that you define. Your customer can choose whether or not to respond.
Basic plans are limited to two proactive chat triggers.
This article contains the following sections:
Considerations before using proactive chats
Before you use a proactive chat, consider the following:
- If the chat is started by a proactive trigger, the pre-chat form requirement is bypassed and chats can be created without users having to fill in their name and email address. For more information, see Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer contact information?
- A proactive trigger can bypass department routing managed by the form. For more information, see Department routing is not working correctly in chat.
Identifying when to use proactive chats
Reaching out to returning web visitors
Repeat customers and return web visitors are valuable to your business. To help make sure these customers are finding what they need, you can proactively reach out to them via chat to welcome them back and see if there is anything you can provide guidance with.
Set the conditions of the trigger where the visitor previous visits is greater than 0, as well as the conditions where the customer has not yet been helped by another agent or initiated a chat already themselves.
Reducing cart abandonment
As a customer, how many times have you added items to your online shopping cart, and then completely abandoned it?
To provide customers that extra push to purchase, you can set up a trigger to initiate a proactive chat when a customer is on your shopping cart page URL for a specific length of time, more than 60 seconds, for example. You can send them a personalized message to see if they have any questions about the items in their cart.
Answering questions on critical webpages
Similar to the previous shopping cart example, there may be some critical pages on your website or Help Center that you would want to provide customers with an extra level of support by reaching out to them.
One example would be when a prospect is on your pricing page and evaluating which plan or product to select. You can intiate a proactive chat to provide guidance they might need.
