Recipe: Delay your proactive messages to give customers a chance to fill out the pre-chat form

Problem:

If you have a proactive chat trigger that sends a message to customers browsing your website, this bypasses the pre-chat form, as described in this article: Why do I keep receiving chats with no customer contact information? There is no perfect solution to this problem, but there are a couple creative ways to improve your customer and agent experience.

Solutions:

One creative solution is to accept the customers wont get a chance to access the pre-chat form, and use the trigger described in this article to send automated messages asking for a customer's name and email address as soon as they join the chat: Recipe: Create proactive Chat triggers for customer's to enter personal information.

Another solution is to delay all your proactive messages. This gives visitors the opportunity to notice the chat option, and manually request a chat themselves first. Simply add the Still on site or Still on page condition to the top of the conditions list in your proactive chat triggers. Then, put a good amount of wait time in the condition. Remember, it counts in seconds. For example 300 would be 5 minutes.

Here is an example proactive chat trigger with the delay built in:

1. Run trigger: When a visitor has loaded the chat widget
2. Check conditions: Check all of the following conditions
   1. Still on site | 300
   2. Visitor requesting chat | Is false
   3. Visitor served | Is false
3. Perform the following actions
   1. Send message to visitor | Customer Service | Let us know if you have any questions!

Note:  If you use department routing, proactive messages may bypass any routing you have set up in the pre-chat form or other triggers. Add the action set visitor department to each of the trigger above to make sure these proactive chat conversations are routing to the correct department.