topic Re: How to identify a contact in the chat? in APIs & Integrations

How to identify a contact in the chat?

LukaszWiktor — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:09:01 GMT

Hi,

how can I identify a visitor in the chat box? I've tried the identify API

 var _hsq = window._hsq = window._hsq || []; 
_hsq.push(["identify", { email: "${email}" }]);

but it didn't work. New chat conversations still appear as "Uknown Visitor"

I'd appreciate your help.

Thanks,
Lukasz

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Romusc — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 17:08:33 GMT

Hi Lukasz,

I am having the exact same issue.
I'm interested if you found a solution !

Thanks,
Romu

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Derek_Gervais — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 17:26:10 GMT

Hi @LukaszWiktor and @Romusc,

The "identify" method of the Tracking Code API only stores the identity information in the tracker; you'll need to call the "trackEvent" or "trackPageView" method to actually pass the identity info to HubSpot. Are you both subsequently calling one of these events?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

LukaszWiktor — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 04:21:12 GMT

Hi @Derek_Gervais,

Thanks for the hint! I was only calling identify. Now, I added trackPageView right below but it still didn't help. My code snippet looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" id="hs-script-loader" async defer src="//js.hs-scripts.com/1234567.js"></script>
<script>
    var _hsq = window._hsq = window._hsq || [];
    _hsq.push(["identify",{
         email: "user@example.com",
    }]);
    _hsq.push(["trackPageView"]);
</script>

I have this user already in my Contacts but when they start a chat conversation then it shows up as "Unknown Visitor"

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Derek_Gervais — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 20:36:32 GMT

Hi @LukaszWiktor,

Is this true even after a page refresh? My gut tells me that the contact identification is working, but the messages client isn't being updated with the identity info. Can you try making the association, then refreshing?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 13:10:41 GMT

Hiii
I have same issue but after refreshing it's identified in chat conversation. I have SPA in Angular 5. Any other solution for Why should i have to refresh.??

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Dimo_Boyadzhiev — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 13:37:55 GMT

Hi
I have the same issue

<!-- Set up the path for the initial page view -->
<script>
    var _hsq = window._hsq = window._hsq || [];
    _hsq.push(["identify",{
        email: '{{ app.user.email }}',
        id: '{{ app.user.id }}'
    }])
    _hsq.push(["trackPageView"]);
</script>

<!-- Start of HubSpot Embed Code -->
<script type="text/javascript" id="hs-script-loader" async defer src="//js.hs-scripts.com/portal_id.js"></script>
<!-- End of HubSpot Embed Code -->

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Vinicius_Pavei — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 22:51:06 GMT

Did you find any solution?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Dimo_Boyadzhiev — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 07:40:01 GMT

No,
it is not possible.

The chat and analytics are two different systems and they don't communicate each other.

I had to use another chat provider

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Vinicius_Pavei — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 12:52:10 GMT

Hi!

Could you tell me which chat provider you use?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

6CMarketing — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 14:49:20 GMT

Hello, we have the exact same issue. We want to identify the conversations, but instead we only get "Unknown Visitor".

Any solution for this ?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 12:45:29 GMT

Any updates on this?

My problem is that I need to re-identify my users upon logout / another login, but it seems that the first identify is stucked, and when the chat widget opens, the previous history shows up, and the messages goes in the name (email) of the first identified user no matter if I call again the window._hsq.push([ "identify", { email: .. } ]). What is the proper way to re-identify the chat so I could handle my single page app logout/login process?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

Dexter_Chen — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 13:25:34 GMT

@Derek_Gervais I'm using Forms API to submit hubspotutk along with contact name/email/ip upon login, yet I still need to refresh for the contact to be recognized by the bot.

When the user was just logged in for the first time, it's still considered an unknown visitor by the bot, and simply one more refresh would solve the issue. It has nothing to do with timing, I tried dynamically loading the script 10 seconds after the page was fully loaded upon login but I still had to refresh one more time to have the bot recognize the contact.

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

jordand — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 10:36:02 GMT

Was there ever a solution on this? we have the same problem, visitors are identified as unknown until refresh the page we only want to show chat to people in a targeted segment, so need to know who they are and not hope that they refresh the page, on a single page application

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

breslinv — Thu, 30 May 2019 14:36:00 GMT

We are also having issues with this and are using Segment. Are there any solutions? Surely this is a critical requirement?

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

cbarley — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:10:51 GMT

Hey all, we recently came out with a Conversations JavaScript API, where you wouldn't have to refresh the page. This is great for SPAs because now you can just refresh the widget and not the page itself. After some quick testing on a page of my own, I was able to identify the contact, refresh the widget programmatically, then have the ability to see the contact's email address within the Conversations tool.

screenshot: http://prntscr.com/nvwptt

We still can't use personalization tokens inside the chat unless you're using bots, but now the contacts you identify won't show up as "Anonymous Visitor". Here's the code I used:

function onConversationsAPIReady() {
    var _hsq = window._hsq = window._hsq || [];
    console.log("ready")
    _hsq.push(["identify",{
    	email: "test@testing.com"
    }]);
    _hsq.push(['trackPageView']);
    setTimeout( () => {
      console.log("refresh")
      window.HubSpotConversations.widget.refresh();
    }, 1000)
  }

  function sendIdentify(){
    if (window.HubSpotConversations) {
     onConversationsAPIReady();
    } else {
      window.hsConversationsOnReady = [onConversationsAPIReady];
    }

feel free to keep testing, but just wanted to make sure you were aware of this new JS API we have.

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

damdam — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 14:19:47 GMT

@cbarley Thanks for your precious feedback!

I've been spending the last few hours on this but I'm still having issues in using the refresh API.

I'm using the exact same code you posted; I also verified that things are lined up just fine temporally (the sequence of events is correct: once the hsConversation API is ready my code pushes the "identify" value and the "trackPageView" into _hsq and then calls the refresh function).

Though, nothing happens, my user is still "unknown" to HubSpot (even though I've provided id and email matching one of my contacts).
Similarly, if I setup the Chatflow to show only for tracket contacts, the widget never shows, even though I provide the id and email of the contact before calling refresh.

I still need to do a hard reload of the page to see the widget popping up. 😞

This is the code I run (in a simplified version, without setTimeout and fake data):

window._hsq = window._hsq || [];
window._hsq.push([
  "identify",
  { email: "email@example.com" }
]);
window._hsq.push(["trackPageView"]);

window.HubSpotConversations.widget.refresh();

Nothing happens when I do that.

What I noticed is that when this happens I find the following response for the network request issued by your code to the url: https://api.hubspot.com/livechat/v1/message/public?portalId=XXXXX&...&mobile=false&messagesUtk=YYYY

{"@type":"HIDE_WIDGET","type":"HIDE_WIDGET","metadata":{"@type":"HIDE_WIDGET_META","reason":"NO_MATCHING_WELCOME_MESSAGE","description":"No matching welcome message for portal XXXXX page http://localhost:3000/mypageurl or visitor does not match targeting rules"}}

Might this be linked to the widget not refreshing as intended?

Ah, one additional thing:

I noticed that if I open my contact detail page in HubSpot, I correctly see ALL the "trackPageView" events I pushed!
Even though the chat widget keep not recognizing the user (unless I refresh the page), the "trackPageView" event I push seems to correctly reach HubSpot and map to the correct contact!

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

cbarley — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 17:13:14 GMT

Hi @damdam , the contact's name or email can't show inside the chat bubble since personalization tokens aren't able to be used in that setting, but if you identify the contact, you should be able to see in the Conversations Tool inside HubSpot that they aren't an Unknown Visitor anymore.

The weirdness of that behavior you're seeing right now could also be because you're testing on localhost. I've seen strange behavior there so you should probably just test out on an unpublished test page in HubSpot.

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

damdam — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 19:46:00 GMT

Hi @cbarley , thanks for the quick reply!

I'm aware of the issue with the personalization token 🙂
That's not what I was talking about. My problem is exactly what you guessed: in HubSpot the visitor is not recognized as a contact and shows up as "Unknown visitor" (until I refresh the browser page that is, from that moment onward it is properly recognized).

I honestly don't see why using localhost might be a problem, since there's no mention of any domain in Hubspot (so HubSpot wouldn't be able to apply any special behaviour depending on the URL of the incoming request); if that was the case, I would expect the visitor not to be recognized, ever, not even after a page refresh (and that is not the case).

I'll try connecting through a tunnel (to proxy my localhost address through a public address) and see if there's any difference but I won't hold my breath on this.. I've a feeling that it won't change that much.

I'll keep you posted 🙂

Thanks again for the prompt feedback, much appreciated!

Re: How to identify a contact in the chat?

israelj — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 14:14:35 GMT

Hi,

I'm trying to follow your example but it seems some of your code is missing. How do you utilize the call to sendIdentify()?

Thanks!