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Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer email or phone number?

Zendesk Team
  • Edited

Question

We enabled the pre-chat form and require customer contact information. However, sometimes we see a chat from a customer and there is no name or contact info, just Visitor 123456. Why do I keep receiving these chats?

Answer

If a chat is manually requested by the visitor, they are required to fill in your pre-chat form. If the chat is started by a proactive trigger, the pre-chat form requirement is bypassed. The customer is placed in the queue to be served when they reply to the message sent by the trigger, without having to enter their contact information in the pre-chat form.

You can identify these chats by looking at the first message in the transcript. That message is not from the end user as expected, but from a proactive trigger instead. In some cases, if the end user replies to an expired chat session created by a proactive trigger, a new chat is created without the visitor's name and email address. For these cases, there isn't the information that the proactive trigger fired previously, and the first message shows as made by the customer.

Another instance where this can occur is when the visitor's session to Chat times out but the window or tab does not close. If the customer reconnects to the widget to send a new message, the pre-chat form will not automatically be presented to the visitor.

For more information on how to avoid the latter scenario, see this article: How do I ensure the pre-chat form is presented to a visitor if they time out then reconnect?

Note: Only the end user can terminate a chat session. Ending a chat by an agent doesn't end the session unless you are using the Chat Mobile SDK. For more information, see the article: When do chats time out?
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4 Comments

  • Gatis Bertmanis

    Any news? We don't have any triggers, and in events, it's shown that the end-user started a conversation.

    But still, there are cases when the end-user shows as a visitor, despite that name and e-mail are required to enter, before chatting starts.

    0
  • DJ Buenavista Jr.
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi Gatis,

    Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.

    In regards to your concern, I was able to check your Help Center and I tried to start a chat without inputting any name and email, information but it didn't let me start a live chat session.

    I would advise double-checking your Chat triggers if you have a chat pro-active trigger enabled, if so that would bypass your pre-chat form rules.

    Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!

    Kind regards,

    DJ Buenavista Jr. |
    Customer Advocacy Specialist | Support@Zendesk.com

    -1
  • Maoqin Xie

    I have embedded the code on my website and it worked as expected. But I am wondering pre-fill the pre-chat form if the user logged in. What should I do? The below code is not working in react js. 

    <script type="text/javascript">
zESettings = {
  webWidget: {
    contactForm: {
      fields: [
        { id: 'description', prefill: { '*': 'This is prefilled description text' } }
      ]
    }
  }
};
</script>
    0
  • Juraj Jarmek

    Hello,

    Please note that you would have to check if actually the contact form in the Web Widget Form was turned on and you are using that one in your widget.

    For example:

    For more info:

    Using Web Widget to embed customer service in your website

    Only then it will work correctly, as in the example below:

    Most of the time the issue is that clients are not using the correct widget contact form.

    You can also test it out in Codepen.io first to see if your widget script and zeSettings script is correctly rendering in the test window as I did above.

    Regarding React.js itself, Zendesk cannot troubleshoot the framework itself, but in your place, I would check how React is rendering the JSX into vanilla HTML/JS when it is compiled.

    Check in the inspect window if you are seeing what you would see if you would use vanilla HTML/JS.

    Hope that helps!

    0

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