To meet the requirement of asking questions automatically before a chat session begins without additional licensing, Pre-chat surveys are the native configuration within the Omnichannel for Customer Service chat widget. While Power Virtual Agents (now Copilot Studio) can ask questions, it often requires additional licensing depending on the tenant's current SKU.

For protecting sensitive data like credit card numbers, Data masking rules are the standard mechanism. These rules use regular expressions to identify and mask sensitive patterns (like credit card strings) in real-time, preventing the information from being visible to the agent or stored in the plain-text transcript, ensuring compliance and security.

Microsoft Learn (Dynamics 365 Customer Service): "Configure a pre-chat survey." This documentation specifies that pre-chat surveys are used to gather information from users before a conversation starts.

Reference: Section: "Omnichannel for Customer Service" > "Chat" > "Configure pre-chat survey."

Microsoft Learn (Dynamics 365 Customer Service): "Create and manage data masking rules." This guide explains how to define masking patterns to hide sensitive data in chat and asynchronous channels.

Reference: Section: "Omnichannel for Customer Service" > "Security" > "Data masking."

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide (2024/2025 editions): Clarifies that basic Omnichannel capabilities include Pre-chat surveys, whereas Power Virtual Agents/Copilot Studio integration may involve separate service credits or licensing tiers.

Microsoft Tech Community - Customer Service Blog: "Best Practices for Securing Customer Data in Omnichannel." (Official Product Team publication). Details the application of Regular Expressions (Regex) within Data Masking rules to redact PCI (Payment Card Industry) data.