Support Portal provides a pre-chat form mechanism that captures visitor identity and context before a conversation is initiated. When enabled on a website inbox, the form requires visitors to submit structured data — such as name, email address, or organization-specific identifiers — before they can begin a live chat session.
Operational objective
Pre-chat forms address several operational requirements:
- Contact identification — Ensure that every inbound conversation is linked to an identifiable contact record. This eliminates anonymous interactions and provides agents with context from the first message.
- Data enrichment — Populate contact fields automatically with visitor-provided data, reducing manual data entry and improving record completeness.
- Routing precision — Collected field values can be used as conditions in automation rules, enabling conversations to be assigned to the correct team or agent based on the information provided. See Automation.
- Compliance readiness — For regulated environments, pre-chat forms ensure that required identifiers (e.g., citizen ID, account number, case reference) are collected before any interaction begins.
Pre-chat forms are available exclusively for website live chat inboxes.
Enabling the pre-chat form
Navigate to Settings > Inboxes, then select the configuration panel for the target website inbox.
Open the Pre Chat Form tab. Toggle the form to enabled.
Once enabled, every visitor who initiates a conversation through this inbox will be presented with the form before the chat session starts.
Configuring form fields
The pre-chat form supports two categories of fields:
Standard fields
These correspond to core contact record properties:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Full Name | The visitor's name, mapped directly to the contact record. |
| Email Address | The visitor's email, used for contact identification and follow-up notifications. |
| Phone Number | The visitor's phone number, stored on the contact record. |
Standard fields are available by default and cover the most common identification requirements.
Custom fields
Custom fields extend the form with organization-specific data points. These fields are sourced from Custom Attributes defined in your workspace. Any custom attribute created under Settings > Custom Attributes with the contact_attribute type becomes available for inclusion in the pre-chat form.
To add new fields to the form, create additional custom attributes first. See Custom Attributes for configuration details.
Field configuration options
Each field in the pre-chat form exposes the following configuration parameters:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Key | The unique identifier for the field. This corresponds to the attribute key on the contact record. |
| Type | The data type of the field — Text, List, Number, Date, Link, or Boolean. |
| Required | When enabled, visitors cannot submit the form without providing a value for this field. |
| Label | The display name shown to visitors on the chat widget. |
| Placeholder | Hint text displayed inside the field before the visitor enters a value. |
Administrators can perform the following actions on each field:
- Enable or disable individual fields to control which data points are collected.
- Reorder fields to establish a logical sequence for the visitor experience.
- Modify labels and placeholders to match organizational terminology.
- Toggle validation to enforce or relax required-field rules.
How collected data maps to contact records
When a visitor submits a pre-chat form, the platform processes the data as follows:
- Contact matching — The system checks whether a contact record already exists with the provided email address or phone number. If a match is found, the conversation is linked to the existing contact.
- Contact creation — If no match exists, a new contact record is created with the submitted field values.
- Attribute population — Standard field values are written to the corresponding contact properties. Custom field values are stored as custom attributes on the contact record.
This ensures that agents have full context — including any prior conversation history — from the moment a new conversation appears in their queue.
Visitor experience
When the pre-chat form is active, visitors see a structured form before the chat input becomes available. The form displays all enabled fields in the configured order, with required fields marked accordingly.
The visitor must complete all required fields and submit the form before the conversation session begins. Once submitted, the chat interface loads and the visitor can begin typing their message.
Enterprise deployment examples
Pre-chat forms are particularly relevant in regulated and high-accountability environments:
- Government service portals — A municipal service desk can require citizens to provide their national ID number or case reference before initiating a conversation. This ensures that every interaction is traceable and linked to the correct citizen record.
- Telecom account support — A telecom operator can require the customer's account number or service contract ID as a mandatory field, enabling agents to retrieve the relevant account details immediately and reducing verification overhead during the conversation.
- Financial services — A regulated institution can collect a policy number or client reference, ensuring that conversations are associated with the correct customer record from the outset and that audit requirements are met.
In each scenario, the combination of required standard fields and custom attributes ensures that the organization's data collection policies are enforced consistently, without relying on agents to request this information manually during the conversation.
Combining pre-chat forms with automation
Pre-chat form data can serve as input for automation rules. For example:
- Assign conversations to a specific team based on a custom field value (e.g., route all conversations where the "Department" field equals "Billing" to the billing support team).
- Apply a label automatically based on the visitor's selection in a list-type custom field.
- Trigger a notification when a high-priority identifier is detected in a submitted field.
See Automation for details on configuring rules that act on conversation and contact properties.