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

Question

We enabled, the pre-chat form sets customer contact information to "required" in the widget’s form settings. However, sometimes we see a chat from a customer and there is no email, social, or phone number contact for the user, just Visitor 123456. Why are these chat sessions bypassing our requirements?

Answer

If a chat is manually requested by the visitor, they're required to fill in the 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. 

From the Chat dashboard, select Settings > Triggers. The Chat trigger action, “Send Message to visitor” is the one proactively reaching out to users based on the trigger’s conditions.

You can also simulate a visitor to match the Chat trigger’s conditions and see the proactive notification. For more information, see this article: How can I simulate a chat for testing?

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 any 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 and then reconnect?

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