How can I troubleshoot common Chat trigger issues?

Zendesk Chat triggers enable you to send proactive messages, set a department, and even add tags to your visitors. By default, there are pre-formatted triggers on your account to get you started. To see a list of preformatted triggers, go to Settings > Triggers.

Below are some common issues with Chat trigger and ways to resolve them.

My visitors don't receive the proactive message

My proactive message doesn't appear on mobile

I created a trigger to set a department but it doesn't set

The email address on the proactive message doesn't show correctly

My visitors don't receive the proactive message

Ensure you are online?

Triggers work when at least one of your agents is online. You cannot create a trigger that sends a message when your agents are offline.

To set your availability, see the article: Configuring your chat availability settings.

Ensure to use the right trigger conditions

Run trigger conditions

The Run trigger conditions are the base condition set when to run your triggers. For more information about the three options for Run trigger, see the article: Working with Chat triggers.

For proactive messages, use When a visitor has loaded the chat widget.

Set When a visitor has loaded the chat widget to ensure that the trigger runs the moment your web page loads in the visitor's browser.

Still on page and Still on site

The order placement of the time conditions affects how the trigger behaves. When you test triggers with time conditions, use the incognito mode or a private browser to ensure cookies don't affect your test.

My proactive message doesn't appear on mobile

Proactive messages on mobile browsers don't open the chat window as desktop browsers do.

For chats embedded on mobile apps via the mobile SDK's, proactive triggers don't pop up because the chat session doesn't initiate unless you click on the chat within the app.

I added a visitor URL condition but the trigger doesn't work

Check which operator works well for your campaign

You can target key visitors that are on specific pages of your site with the Visitor page URL condition.

The Equals operator reads the exact URL of the page. For example, if you want to target customers on the homepage https://www.zendesk.com/ and not the other pages, the format looks like this:

The Contains operator allows you to check keywords or phrases in the URL without looking at the whole URL link for the page. For example, you want to target visitors on all pages with the word pricing in the URL, the format looks like this:

Visitors that go to zendesk.com/pricing and or zendesk.com/explore/pricing get a trigger.

You can also use the Regex operator. An example is to target users on multiple pages that don't have a common phrase or word in the URL. For more information on how to use regex for Visitor URL, see the article: Recipe: Route a chat to a department based on the URL of the website.

For one-pager websites and desktop applications

Triggers with Visitor URL conditions don't work with one-pager websites because it doesn't identify the change in the page when the visitor loads the section. Use update path API to identify these changes as end users navigate through the sections of your website.

I created a trigger to set a department but it doesn't set

Review the order of your chat triggers

The system reads and acts on trigger conditions and actions from the top to the bottom of the list. Some actions should happen first before another action can take place.

Setting a department using triggers must come as the first action before Send message to visitor action is set. When Send message to visitor is set as the first action on the list, the trigger ignores the Set visitor department action.

The email address on the proactive message doesn't show correctly

Review the format is correct

For the trigger actions, the at sign '@' is used as a placeholder. To add an email address on Send Message to visitor, Replace note, Set name of Visitor, and Append, add an extra @ symbol. For example, user@domain.com should be entered as user@@domain.com.

Furthermore, your trigger doesn't work if the at sign '@' is part of the agent name as shown below.

For more information about Chat trigger placeholders, see the article: Trigger placeholders.