Required email and form fields before chat or bot conversations

[amchartman]

I have seen several merged chats suggesting that people leave their email so companies can follow up. I understand this idea was delivered, and a prompt to leave an email was added to the chat feature. However, I am wondering if we can add a mandatory email field to the chat so we have a way to follow-up with leads who do not leave an email voluntarily. My suggestion would be to make this feature optional so companies can choose whether or not they'd like to enable it. 

[#2]

Despite our chat starting with "Enter your NAME and EMAIL to get started", we get a lot of enthusiastic customers who start the conversation with their request/question/etc.. This is especially true for our international customers who may skim over the intro text.

As such, HubSpot will grab text or responses that aren't the customer's name and use that to populate the name filed in the contact info. So for example, we'll get a lot of "I want to get a quote" populated as the name for customers (see attached photo). We'll then have to manually go in and change the name (if the customer has even left their name).

I think a solution to this problem would be to have a simple 2 input form (an input for name and for email) before activating the chat. This mitigates the chatbot pulling in and populating the incorrect customer information.   

 

[#3]

I came to the idea board to post this exact thing. As awesome as chatbots can be, having a chatbot store a visitor's question as their name negatively impacts the experience. Having this feature could fix that!

Also, this would help with chat follow up, and just provide a better experience. Many other live chat platforms allow you to customize fields that potential customers can fill out. A basic name and email would allow you to start the chat knowing their name and have a more personable conversation. You also don't have to deal with not being able to answer a good question if they do not provide an email when unavailable, even when prompted. 

[#4]

It would be great if our users could fill out a pre-chat form instead of just relying on a bot to collect information.  While it is great to be conversational and record information that way, I have run into instances where our customer responds to the question: "what is your name", with: "I'm looking for X product".  Then the bot responds with: "Okay I'm looking for X product, how can I help today?" which kind of defeats the social trust we are trying to build by using a live chat

[#5]

The Hubspot team even mentioned it in their recent live chat blog post

[#6]

I agree - this is a huge feature that we've lost since migrating our chat over to Hubspot. Previously, we used LiveChat Inc. and were able to gate chats to ensure that all users are providing their name and email address before they were able to begin a chat. This was set up as a form where it was made clear that the user could not proceed or begin a chat until the mandatory information is provided. 

As a workaround, we created a bot to ask for email addresses before the user is connected to a real agent, but this still isn't meeting our needs. We're finding that users are getting frustrated because it appears as though they're already in a chat but aren't getting the answers that they're looking for. Essentially, it's a feature we've lost moving to Hubspot and the workaround isn't delighting us.

[#7]

@amchartman @AveryReid could you please elaborate on how the email capture prompt within chat and the optional lead qualify bot solution do not solve this for you? Thank you for your feedback!

[#8]

@hroberts Some users don't enter an email even when prompted because of the chat style. Our previous provider (LiveChat Inc), who I encourage you to look at, offered the option for a form before the chat begins. This made it very clear to users that they could not even chat until they completed the form. In our case, we just asked for Name and Email, with only the email field as mandatory. A similar form was in place when no agents were online that specified that the email address was required so we could reply once an agent became available. Once a user submitted their email address, they were greeted by the chat agent automatically when possible. With a lead qualifying bot through HubSpot, the user is already in a "chat" with the bot where the bot prompts them to enter their email. Some people enter their email address and then never type their question, even when prompted because they feel like they've done what's been asked of them. Other users don't enter their email address and instead just immediately pose their question. If they don't provide an email address, we've set it up so the bot then says "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Can you please enter your email address?" at this point some users get frustrated and drop off the chat without entering an email at all and some get confused as to why we need their email. We never had these issues with our previous provider because it was very clear that they could not chat at all with a bot or a human if they don't enter an email address. Again, my recommendation would be to look into how LiveChat and other popular chat providers handle this. It seems like quite a tablestakes feature that is missing.

[#9]

@hroberts Our issue is the same as @AveryReid mentioned. Many users do not leave an email so we have no way of following up with them after they leave the chat. 

[#10]

@hroberts I no longer have access to LiveChat Inc. since we've terminated with them, but here is a screenshot I had from a support ticket that demonstrates the general idea of how this was managed. This is the offline form which instructs a user to create a ticket. The form that appeared when an agent was online was very similar, just asking for Name and Email instead of Email, Subject, and Message. Hopefully this helps.

[#11]

This idea could really help create a more useful chat bot. Would really like to see it available in the future. I'd also love to see the chat bot able to verify if the information a user enters is an actual email address. I've tested responding to the bot email prompt with random text, and it accepts it is an email address - even if it's not formatted like an email.