Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
The pre-chat form asks a few questions before the conversation starts. Every field is a reason somebody leaves.
Live chat is on its way out: Zendesk removes it on 31 January 2028 and no longer sells it to new customers. What is below still works until then, but any effort you put into it has an end date.
Set it up
- Open Admin Center, select Chat, then the Chat dashboard.
- Go to Settings > Widget and click Forms at the top.
- Turn Pre-chat form on.
- Choose the fields and which are required, then save and try it as a visitor.
The fields you get
| Visitor profile | Name and email, on or off together. Supports social sign-in through Facebook or Google. |
| Phone number | Off unless you turn on Allow phone number; Require phone number makes it mandatory. |
| Department | Appears automatically if departments exist. You can make it required, but taking it off the form needs a line of code. |
| Message | Added automatically. Require question makes it mandatory. |
| Greeting | Plain text only, for an instruction or a welcome. No formatting. |
Name and email cannot be separated: the visitor profile is one setting for both. If you only want an email address, this form is not where you get it.
Ask for two things at most
Name and email, where you need to follow up. A department choice, where routing genuinely depends on it.
Anything more and you are interviewing somebody who wanted to ask a question. The agent can ask the rest in the conversation, where it feels like a conversation.
Required fields cost you conversations
A required email address on a pre-chat form loses a measurable share of visitors, particularly those with a quick question. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you genuinely need to reach them afterwards.
For a chat that resolves in one exchange, it usually is not.
The department field
Only if departments are real and the visitor can tell which they need. A list of internal team names asks the customer to know your organisation chart, and they will guess.
Remember it appears on its own the moment departments exist. Deciding not to show it is a deliberate act, not the default.
Test the whole path
Fill it in as a visitor, start the conversation, and check what the agent sees. Fields collected but not shown to the agent are pure cost.
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