Live chat settings - Don't ask for customers email if the email is already known#268

One of the options for bots is to ask a question to get an email address - we use this in combinationwith other questions to get a structured reply back for doing support.

However, if the bot has captured an email address via a question and the visitor then goes on to type something in to live chat - continual.ly will again ask them for their email address to send a reply to - even though they just typed in their email address 2 mnutes ago.

This doesn’t make any sense to me - and it’s not a greatuser experience to be asked to type the same thing in twice in short succession.

I think this should work the same way typing an email into live chat works. If you type a question into live chat you’ll be asked for an email address to reply to. If you then ask another question it doesn’t ask for your email address again because it already knows it.

It should be exactly the same if you’ve just asked for an email address via a bot. From the users perpective there’s no difference between typing their email address in to a bot and typing it in when live chat asks for it. In both cases a both is asking for their email. They don’t want to have to type it again because the first time a bot asked and the second time the live chat asked - they don’t know or care that they’re two different things inside continual.ly.

Hi Kathy,

We previously used to skip the email field when a customers email had already been captured but we found that this would lead to more issues incase the email had a typo or the customer used different emails for different tasks. So now we prefill the field with the email address that was previously captured.

If you want to skip over email questions within your bot’s conversation I have a suggestion!

1. Add a conditional logic object before any email objects in your bots conversation.
2. Set the conditional logic rule to check if the customers email is known.
3. Then if the email is known, you can set the true path to skip over the email question

For the live chat issue, I am going to suggest the idea of adding an additional setting that only asks for email if the email is not known.

Hope this is helpful!

I have attached an image example of using conditional logic!

Hi Andy - thanks. It’s not an issue at all in the bot since when they get asked to enter their email address it’ll be the first time, or it will have been a long time since they were last asked. So I don’t think we’ll need the workaround. Thanks for supplying it though.

The problem is really with the live chat. What we get happening is that people will go through the bot, provide their answers including email, then the instant the bot is finished they’ll type something else - maybe a question or more info or even just saying thanks - and because it’s now in live chat it ask for their email again.

It’s the fact it’s asking again 2 seconds after previously asking that’s the issue. If it last asked an hour ago or the email was provided via a url parameter then it’s fine to ask again to confirm. It’s only really an issue on that immediate transition from a bot that asks for an email straight into live chat asking for it again right away.

Yes - having that as an option would be good. And obviously make sure there’s continuity between collecting an email address in ta bot and live chat being aware of that email address.

Thanks