Introduction
The Live Chat is a very handy communication channel that you can add to your Webchat widget in order to increase customer engagement on your Website. It doesn't require the customer to provide any data before they send you a message - they only have to click on the widget, select Live Chat and start typing!
The live chat can be essential for new prospects or customers that show interest on your products or services, but they might feel hesitant to click directly on Whatsapp. It should then be your aim to create that first touchpoint, collect first data and then take the conversation to WhatsApp to either close the deal, book the first meeting or finalise the order.
You can also implement your live chat into automations to automatically send messages or collect data from your customers, for example.
⚠️ Important: You cannot use Whatsapp nodes on your Live Chat automation, such as any Whatsapp trigger, "Whatsapp: List", "Whatsapp: Template" or "Whatsapp: Quick Response". Those only work with Whatsapp.
Using automations to get your Live Chat customers on Whatsapp
While it sure is handy having a Live Chat on your website, the customer doesn't have to give you any information like his name or phone number. This is great for customers, as it allows them to get in touch with your business very quickly. But after they leave your website, you might be left with no contact information about them and no way of recovering the contact.
This is why depending on your business, it might be a good idea to collect data from those customers, and you can do this with automations!
Two examples on how to collect customer's data from Live Chat
The fictional company in this example is a car dealer. This automation will automatically gather data from the customers so it is possible to get in touch with them even after they leave the Live Chat.
As usual, create a trigger for the automation. Since this is a Live Chat automation, do not select any trigger associated with channels such as Whatsapp, otherwise the automation will not trigger.
With that in mind, create a "New Incoming Message" trigger.
We added a filter with the "contains" variable, so we can automatically trigger the automation every time it detects the words "leasing" or "buy" in a sentence.
Example 1 - Automatically gathering customer data
This automation will automatically gather all the desired customer data.
Starting with the "leasing" message content filter path, we built the start of our automation to gather specific information about the customer's inquire and then move the conversation to a specific inbox. Build the start of your automation the way you think will better benefit your company.
At some point, you can ask for the customer information and update their contact attribute accordingly.
In the example above, we ask the customer for their phone number with a regular "Send Message" node.
Afterwards, we await for the customer's response using the "Wait for Reply" node.
Finally, we update his contact attribute "phone number" with the answer he provided us on "Wait for Reply".
And with this, we now have the customer's phone number! You can also ask for any further information that might be useful to you, such as the customer's name.
Still have questions on how to automatically collect customer data? Check our step-by-step guide here:
Example 2 - Redirecting the customer to Whatsapp
This automation will thank them for their message and directly propose Whatsapp as a communication channel to them.
For "buy", the second path of the message content filter, we can gather the customer's information in a simpler way.
The message contained in the "Send Message" node asks the customers to either click in the link and write a Whatsapp message, or to type their phone numbers.
If they click in the link and write a message, then you will have their name and phone number.
Likewise, if they instead type their phone number, the information will be updated into their contact because of the "Update Contact" node.
And with that you have two ways of collecting data from your customers using Livechat! It's very important to get your Livechat customers into Whatsapp to get their contact information, otherwise you might be losing potential customers when they leave your website.