HubSpot Ideas

amchartman

Required email and form fields before chat or bot conversations

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. 

HubSpot Updates
December 17, 2019 06:02 AM

Hi @abiblu, thanks so much for your feedback. This is very much on the list for next year and totally understand your perspective. 

 

Once I have a better timeline for the release, I will update this thread and we can make sure we get a list for beta users to give us feedback! 

 

Thank you, 

 

Cassie

152 Replies
MichaelC
Guide | Partner

Hi,

 

The issue is that the visitors ignore the bot questions and instead of entering their name, e-mail och phone number they just keep on going.

 

Example

- Bot: Hi and welcome to our page

- Bot: May I start with your name

- Visitor: Hello I spoke to you today on the phone and wanted to reach out to you again.

- Bot: Okey "Hello I spoke to you today on the phone and wanted to reach out to you again." thank you for contacting us - may we please have your e-mail as well.

- Visitor: I just want to get some more ansers

- Bot: Sorry but the e-mail you gave us is invalid.

- Bot: Please give us your phone number
- Visitor: Leaves chat conversation.

 

This could easily be prevented by:

(Excuse the Swedish - I just want to give you a hint on what we are searching for)

Promt messagePromt message

When you click the promt message this form appears before the chat can start.

This will force the visitor to enter the information before we can start chatting.

 

This will also give the posibility to personalize the messages further and also check through if its a current customer, lead or similar so that the chat flow can be adapted to each specifik visitor. But most of all - we will have the information we require to sell.

 

Se my painted example below: 

 

Self made exampleSelf made example

 

Best regards,

 

Michael

BarbClose
Member

The fact that this hasn't been implemented yet is very disappointing.  A required email field has been an option in every other chat program I have ever used.

willprm
Member

@hroberts This is still an active issue. Could you please provide an update as to when we can expect a pre-chat form?

cdewey22
HubSpot Product Team

Hi all - This is still an active issue and something my team is actively thinking about. I will provide more details as we know them! 

 

Thanks, 

 

Cassie

willprm
Member

@cdewey22 Thank you. Do you know when we might be able to receive an update as to when you might have moved passed the thinking stage and onto actually creating a solution? To me this is very high priority and I don't feel it is being treated as such.

cdewey22
HubSpot Product Team

@willprm thanks for the feedback, I am going to email you directly to connect. 

jakevg
Member

Hubspot is clearly not interested or not able to provide this functionality.   There are various questions on forums with lots of people asking for the same thing, but Hubspot moderators just skirt the question and offer up their bots. 

 

Ok, bots are cool, but why don't they just answer the question directly and admit this is something they don't want or can't do?  Or incorporate their customer feedback into the product?

AM8
Top Contributor

I understand the frustration with Bots! They all work on a linear order of questions that customers do not seem to want to follow but the ability to chat without providing the initial email also encourages more chats to happen.

 

My advice is to NOT start with general questions on a chat. For example: What can I help you with?  < that's a big no!> A bot can not handle these ( atleast not in a way the users expect these questions to be handled) 
So I suggest that you start your bot by giving users some options to choose from and then lead the conversation from there. Don't have open-ended questions to start with. 

Thank you.

-AM 

 

 

oussova
Member

This is a very important feature for us as well. A lot of conversations end because visitors just leave the chat without sending their email address. Looking forward to this release!

dirkkoekies
Member

Hi, yep, please. We also need people who want to chat with us to first submit their name and email address. A phone number as an optional field will be great.

cdewey22
HubSpot Product Team

Hi! I am the product manager live chat, this is something we are activetly thinking through right now. We are thinking about it in a very similar way to some of the suggestions being made here. We are thinking it would be a form that can be gated before a conversation or if there is no one available, as well as a few more usecases we are working through.

 

This is on the roadmap so stay tuned! 

 

Thanks, 

 

Cassie

BethKuunda3D
Member

I would really like to see this funcationality as well (as we've used it in other free chat apps previously and are really missing it in Hubspot chat.) If the user isn't forced to leave any contact info, then we can't follow up and it's a lost lead. Thank you!

Archangel
Member

We also need it fast.

abiblu
Contributor

Hi Cassie,

That is good news. HubSpot is meant to be a leader in lead capture (pardon the pun) and the fact that we can't even ask for names and email addresses BEFORE a chat is started means we lose so many leads.

 

Customers never bother to fill it in because why would they? It's not required to get started. And our agents never ask the customers for that information because why would they? It's too cumbersome of a process.

 

Every other live chat solution we've ever used, from Live Person way back in 2008 to Zopim then Zendesk Chat as recently as before we migrated to HubSpot this year, have had this function.

 

I would consider it a basic requirement.

cdewey22
HubSpot Product Team

Hi @abiblu, thanks so much for your feedback. This is very much on the list for next year and totally understand your perspective. 

 

Once I have a better timeline for the release, I will update this thread and we can make sure we get a list for beta users to give us feedback! 

 

Thank you, 

 

Cassie

mattrichardson
Member
I echo this. We’ve been using Purechat for a while but have no switched to hubspot but I’m already starting to become frustrated with this issue. Although I don’t want to I’m tempted to go back to pure chat until hubspot bring this in as a standard feature to their chat.
LTParis
Member

I would actually expand on the idea slightly. I do this in tawk.to and it would be much nicer to have this in HubSpot chat.

1) Simple forms to fill out preceeding the chat.

2) An form that one would fill when the user is away. 

tomshax
Member

Has any progress been made on this? It's such an obvious design flaw and I can't believe that anyone who has a Bot on Hubspot is not negatively experienced by this. I would say that 90% of our customers miss the first question which asks for their name, which is clearly evidence that this does not work. We have even tried to design the welcome to make it as clear as possible but customers still want to jump in with their own question. 

 

Please update us as this was first flagged two years ago!! It is completely standard to have a form at the start of the chat to capture this key information.

carloscar
Member

Hi team, any update?

harry3
Member | Platinum Partner

I would love to see this feature added!

 

It is frustrating when a user on the chat, who seems like a strong oppotunity, does not leave any contact information. Obviously meaning that we can not follow up on the lead and may loose us sales.