Proactive Messages

A proactive message is the bot reaching out first — a short, friendly nudge that appears above the chat bubble before the visitor clicks anything. You configure it on your bot's Proactive Messages page. The Impact card at the top tracks how the feature is doing over a rolling window: messages sent, chats started, and leads captured.

Every bot starts conversations in one of three modes. Smart (recommended) lets the AI decide when and what to say based on visitor behavior — it reads scroll, idle, exit-intent, and cart signals in real time, with anti-spam protection always on. Custom messages lets you write the exact wording and set when each one fires — best when you want full control over timing and copy. Off means visitors only see the bot if they open it themselves. Switching modes never deletes your work — your custom rules stay saved when you flip to Smart and back.

In Smart mode the AI watches behavioral signals — how far someone has scrolled, how long they've been idle, whether their cursor is heading for the exit, how many pages they've viewed, and what's in their cart — and reaches out only when a nudge is likely to help. It tailors the message to what it knows: anonymous visitors get behavior-based prompts, while signed-in customers can get more context-aware ones. If a visitor keeps ignoring the messages, the bot quiets down on its own so it never feels pushy.

Chattiness controls how often Smart mode reaches out; it doesn't affect Custom messages. Conservative sends rare nudges, only on a clear behavioral signal — great for high-trust brands and considered purchases. Balanced (the default) nudges when behavior suggests value but the visitor seems stuck. Aggressive nudges more often — best for stores with short consideration cycles and impulse buys.

Turn this on and the bot offers help when a visitor adds something to their cart but doesn't check out within a couple of minutes. It needs a connected store — Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento — so the bot can see cart events. Once your store is connected and cart events start flowing, the toggle enables automatically.

Switch to Custom mode and open Advanced to author your own trigger rules. Each rule has a message, a page URL pattern (use * to match any page), a time-on-page threshold, and a frequency (once per page view, per session, per day, or every page view). 'Advanced behavior' adds gates like minimum scroll depth, idle seconds, page views in the session, exit intent, and rage-click. 'Audience' narrows who a rule targets: auth status, new vs returning visitor, cart state, country, or referrer. Leave any audience field on 'Any' to skip that constraint.

Advanced also holds three power-user tools. A/B variants (Custom mode) let a single rule rotate up to three message wordings — the same visitor always sees the same variant. Intelligent A/B prompt variants (Smart mode) test alternate prompt phrasings or tone that steer the AI, rather than a fixed message. Brand guardrails keep every proactive message on-brand: banned topics the AI must avoid (case-insensitive whole-word match), required disclaimers you can scope to specific fire types, and free-form tone overrides spliced into the prompt.

Proactive messages are deliberately restrained, so a message may be held back for good reasons: the visit was too short or the visitor just arrived, a message already fired recently on that page (a cooldown), the daily Smart-mode budget was reached, the visitor has been ignoring messages (backoff), the tab isn't visible, or the mode is Off. This is by design — it protects the visitor experience. Finally, remember that edits on this page aren't live until you click Save in the 'You have unsaved changes' bar.