We have started to serve proactive chats on our Contact Us form to experiment with chat routing. We find that when offering a proactive chat, the end user is prompted once to update their information. If they choose not to, the prompt disappears upward toward the beginning of the conversation.

Our top complaint about proactive chat from our agents is that we do not collect required user data before starting a chat, meaning that for unauthenticated visitors, all chats are disjointed rather than tied to a single customer. If the customer is using a private browsing window, or their cookie expires before their next visit, there's almost no way to tie such an anonymous visitor to a chat history.

Our suggestion is that agents be granted a method in the agent chat window to re-prompt for the visitor to update their information. As mentioned above, it's critical to get updated information, and sometimes the agent has to solicit it. It's best to allow them to post the link to "update information" inline with their solicitation.

This is better than requiring the agent to update data manually. When an agent is serving more than one chat at a time, any administrative activity like serving customer data goes by the wayside, while the focus is put on keeping up with the various chats that are in progress. Better to request the information and let the visitor fill it in.

This feature would operate much like the "request feedback" option does today, living in the bottom of the text editor. By clicking the "Request visitor information" button, the link is served again and the customer can fill in their data without having to scroll back to the start of the chat.

Link from the chat window experience:

Area to add "Request visitor information" button: