Pre chat form + Automations = 🚀

When you already have context on the problem you're dealing with, you can solve it quicker and better. Live chat support agents understand this very well. But if you are forced to ask the same questions again and again — May I please have your registered email address?, how can I help you today? let me transfer your chat to the relevant team. — the inefficiency increases for everyone.

The good news: you can avoid these questions by collecting information about your customers as soon as they enter your live chat window, with the help of our pre-chat forms. You can also set up specific rules to determine who to assign these conversations to, what labels to add, or what else to do with such conversations. This creates a suitable workflow for your team, sparing them a lot of time.

Here’s how it works. ⬇️

Step I. Collect user info with pre-chat forms

A pre-chat form is something your visitors fill out before entering into a live chat with you.

Here’s an example of how it looks:

Why are pre-chat forms helpful?

Every business and industry can make use of pre-chat forms. However, there are certain common benefits of this:

A better first point of contact for the customers
More meaningful interaction between the customer and agent
Better cross-team collaboration and efficient customer service process
Decreased conversation resolution time
Reduced agent workload
More satisfied customers
Happier customer support agents 😁

Step II. Add Automation Rules for simpler workflows

After you've received information through your pre-chat form, you can automatically assign customers to specific teams, trigger specific responses, add labels, mute conversations and much more.

Just add Automation rules from the Settings tab on your Chatwoot dashboard.

Here is an example where a conversation is automatically assigned to the France Sales team whenever a conversation is created and the Browser language is detected as French:

P.S. Here is a detailed guide on using Automations in Chatwoot.

Power Play with Automations

Pre-chat forms together with Automation rules can do wonders for your Customer Support workflows. You can set up multiple rules to delight your users as well as save your team’s time.

Let’s say you run an e-commerce store. You can enable a pre-chat form for your live chat widget with fields like:

Name [text type]
Email ID [email type]
Type of issue [list to choose from: tracking, payment, cancellation, etc]
Issue description [message]

To club with, you can make an Automation Rule. So, whenever a conversation is created plus a message containing “payment” is incoming, it would be assigned to the finance team and a label saying “payment_issue” would be added. You can add another rule that would trigger a message saying “Someone will be with you shortly.”

So, whenever agents open the chat, they’ll have all the relevant information at their fingertips.

How are you going to use the Automations? Let us know in the comments.