Proactive chat messages: greet visitors automatically

A proactive message is a chat greeting that your web chat widget shows on its own when a visitor matches your rules: they have spent 30 seconds on the pricing page, they are on their third page, they came from a particular ad campaign, or they are about to leave. If the visitor replies, the reply goes into a normal conversation that your AI answers straight away, and an operator can take over at any time.

Proactive messages are included on the Advanced, Pro and Ultimate plans and need a web chat channel installed on your site (Setting Up the Web Chat Widget). Creating and editing them needs the Admin or Manager role.

They are the automatic counterpart of the Invite to chat button on the Live tab, where a person picks a visitor by hand — see Live visitors.

What the visitor sees

1. When the rules match, your greeting appears as a chat bubble above the chat button, with the AI’s name and picture.
2. After about ten seconds the bubble folds away, but the greeting is not lost: the chat button keeps a badge, and opening the chat shows the greeting as the first message. Only the × on the bubble dismisses it.
3. The visitor opens the chat and types a reply. Only now is a conversation created — greetings nobody answered never clutter your inbox.
4. Your AI answers within seconds, in the visitor’s language, the same way it answers any chat. Escalation rules apply as usual, so a person is brought in when needed (Escalation and Operator Handoff).

Only one greeting is shown at a time, and none while the chat is already open.

Creating a proactive message

Open your project’s settings and choose Marketing → Proactive messages. The list shows every message with its status and how many visitors saw it and started a chat from it. Click New message.

Basics

• Internal name — for your team only; visitors never see it.
• Web channels — which chat widgets show the greeting, or All web channels.
• Priority — when two messages match the same visitor at the same moment, the higher number wins.
• Ask for contact details first — when the visitor replies, the pre-chat form (name, email and any fields you defined) appears in the chat before the conversation starts. The greeting stays visible above it. Without this, the form appears only if it is switched on for the channel. See Collecting names, emails and other details in web chat.

Message

Write the Greeting in your main language. Keep it short and specific to the moment — “Hi! Comparing plans? I can help you pick the right one in a minute” works better than “How can I help?”.

Under Language variants, click Add language, enter a two-letter language code (de, es, ru, …) and the greeting in that language. A visitor whose language matches a variant sees it; everyone else sees the main greeting. The visitor’s language is the one set on the embed code (data-lang), else your page’s language, else the browser’s.

Trigger and audience

When to show decides the moment:

• On page load — as soon as a matching page opens.
• After a delay — after the visitor has been on the page for the number of seconds you enter.
• On scroll depth — when they have scrolled a given percentage of the page.
• After N page views — on their Nth page in the visit.
• On exit intent — when the mouse heads for the browser’s tabs or close button. On phones, where there is no mouse, a quick scroll up, switching tabs or a period of inactivity counts instead.
• On click — when the visitor clicks an element on your page that matches a CSS selector you enter, such as #help-button.

Devices limits the greeting to desktop or mobile, and Minimum time on page stops it from firing on a visitor who leaves straight away.

Audience decides who sees it. With no conditions, every visitor qualifies. Click Add condition group and combine conditions on: Page URL, Page path, Referrer, UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign, Device, Country, Language, Visitor type (new or returning), Visit count, Pages viewed, Day of week and Time of day. Inside a group choose Match all or Match any; with several groups, choose whether all groups or any group must match.

Use Page path for rules like /blog/ — Page URL also includes your domain. To greet visitors from a specific campaign, use the UTM conditions; tagging links is explained in Tracking traffic sources, UTM campaigns and ads.

Frequency and schedule

• Show — Once per session (the default: once per browser tab), Once ever, Every N days, or Every page.
• Hide for N days after dismiss — if the visitor closes the greeting with ×, don’t show it again for this many days.
• Max times per visitor — an overall cap; 0 means no limit.
• Stop showing after the visitor submits — for a greeting, “submits” means starts a chat from it: once they have, they won’t see it again.
• Starts at / Ends at — optional dates, for a greeting tied to a sale or an event.

The limits are counted in the visitor’s browser, per message.

Saving

Save draft keeps the message without showing it to anyone. Save & activate puts it live (or schedules it, if you set a start date). On a live message, Pause stops it and Resume restarts it; Archive retires it for good.

Measuring results

A running message has an Analytics card beside the form:

• Shown — visitors who saw the greeting.
• Engaged — visitors who opened it.
• Started — visitors who replied, which created a conversation.
• Dismissed — visitors who closed it with ×.
• Start rate — Started divided by Shown.

Each message also appears in Insights as a goal under its own name once the first visitor starts a chat from it, so you can see how the visitors it reached went on to convert — see Conversion goals.

Tips

• Match the greeting to the page: pricing, checkout and help pages each deserve their own message.
• Start with a delay of 20–30 seconds. Greeting people the instant a page loads feels pushy and they haven’t read anything yet.
• Make sure the AI can answer what the greeting invites: if it offers help choosing a plan, your knowledge base should describe the plans.
• Use exit intent sparingly, and keep Once per session or stricter so nobody is greeted on every page.

Not seeing the greeting?

• Check that the message is Active, its dates (if any) include today, and the right web channel is selected.
• Your own frequency limits apply to you too: if you already saw or dismissed it, open the site in a private window to test again.
• The greeting does not appear while the chat window is open, or while another proactive greeting is showing.
• If the list shows a plan notice and New message is disabled, the project owner’s plan doesn’t include proactive messages.