You can use Flow Builder to create answers for your conversation bots, giving your customers the opportunity to self-serve their support issues before connecting with agents. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the Flow Builder UI and basic functionality. For information about working with Flow Builder, see Building a bot using answers.
This article includes the following topics:
The Flow Builder UI
Flow Builder is the tool you use to create answers for your bot, which controls how it behaves in response to customer input.
The Flow Builder components are listed below. Each plays an important role in building your answer:
- Flow, your answer represented in a decision tree format, as a series of connected steps representing the interaction the bot can have with a customer. You can select a step to configure the bot's responses, and add steps to the answer. The navigation controls at the bottom of the flow allow you to zoom in and out of the flow, or pan to areas in the flow, and you can pinch to zoom using a touchpad or touch screen.
- Configuration panel, where you can customize each step in your answer. The appearance of this panel changes based on what part of the flow you're working on.
- Answer builder (shown above), displayed when you initially create an answer, and when you select the top step in the answer flow. Here, you can edit your answer intent, and work with your question variations.
- Configuration tab, which appears when you select a step to the answer, or add a new step to an answer. Here, you can select the type of step you want to add to your answer, add and edit automated messages, and build lists of options for your customers to choose from. For detailed information on these step types, including usage and configuration rules, visual examples of the steps in Flow Builder, and how each appears to your customers in a Web Widget, see Understanding bot step types.
- Preview tab, for previewing the customer experience created by your flow, before releasing it to your customers. Click the Preview tab in the Configuration panel to view.
- Footer, which appears at the bottom of the screen, under the Flow. On the footer, you'll find the Preview and Done buttons, the bot the current answer is a part of, and the status (draft or live) of that bot. Note that even if the bot is Live, any new answers or updates to existing answers will not appear in the bot until they're published. See Publishing bot updates for more information.
Publishing bot updates
Any of the changes made in Flow Builder must be published before they appear in your messaging channel.
To publish a bot update
- Create or update your answers in Flow Builder, and click Save.
- In the Flow Builder footer, click Publish. This makes the changes live in your messaging channels, and updates the publishing information in the footer.
For more information about publishing, see Publishing answers.
91 Comments
Awesome, thanks @....
Mind if I ask does 'in the short term' equal days, weeks, months or years?
Just trying to decide if we disable it while we await the improvement or not.... thanks.
This flow builder and answer bot is more time consuming than helpful. You are unable to modify when "Talk to a human" will be needed. Unable to edit when to ask for information if user needs to be transferred to a live rep, it's asking the user to rate the chat even if you have disabled it from live chat settings (there's no way for you to disable bot from asking for a rating). How soon can you get this altogether? Don't call it flow-builder if it doesn't allow you to modify the flow from end to end!
Hey @... We are planning to remove the 'Talk to a human" option from the system flows so in the future, you will have full control over when the "talk to a human" option is presented and the info it collects.
In messaging, Csat ratings is managed in Support instead of Chat, this is an article to show how you can disable Csat
Thank you @... for your feedback. When is going to be available? Having full control of the entire flow? Also, during our pilot, a lot of our users have noticed that they are unable to attach files. It is quite inconvenient for users to send the files separately via email, any plans to improve this? Or is there a setting to enable file attachment?
Thank you for the quick revert.
I am also interested in the removal of 'talk to a human" and make it editable in Flow Builder. The Flow Builder route only works at the first response level. If the user tries a search with Answer Bot and still needs to 'talk to a human' then the route specified in Flow Builder is ignored. In my use case, I would want to provide the form created in flow builder at any time the user wants to 'talk to a human'.
While setting up the Widget with Answer Bot I have found a lot of confusion between Chat and Message set up. There appears to be some overlap but it is not made very clear in the documentation. Some triggers you set in Chat but others are set in Support. I have only got as far as I have by trial and error. Looking forward to clarification.
Perhaps a document could be produced which covers the complete setup flow in Chat and Support when using Messaging and Answer Bot?
Can I directly integrate the flow builder into the contact form? In order to make it in a way an "Interactive contact form".
I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, we're on the Enterprise plan and I'm trying to setup Flow Builder in Sandox but I can NOT find the option for Flow Builder. I've turned Chat on for my test brand but then can't get any further, help?!
Hi @...
I think you have to enable messaging before you can enable Flow Builder.
Hope that helps!
Flow Builder & Triggers
Query 1: Do flow builder and the 'trigger' function in chat work together?
For e.g., if the trigger for a chat is initiated after a user stays for 20 secs on the page, there can be two cases:
Case 1 -
The user responds to the trigger and the flow builder takes over after the first message from there?
Case 2 -
The flow builder is triggered on a specific condition. At present, the flow builder only gets trigger via user initiation of chat and we couldn't find an option to automatically trigger it.
- Is there any option to adjust our flow builder based on any input query from the user?
Query 3: Can we change the default end-message of the flow builder? For eg. can we get this default message "Got it, Try rephrasing your question or choose from these options" changed?
@...
Is there a businesscase/benchmark available for Flowbuilder we can use to manage expectations of how many (%) tickets Flowbuilder 'prevents' / how much (%) Flowbuilder attributes to selfservice /the % of tickets solved by Flowbuilder and how many customers (%) want to get in touch with agents? Maybe even in comparison to Answerbot? Maybe even a calculationtool like you provide(d) for answerbot, see picture below.
And I don't mean the resolutionrate of suggested articles (answerbot via flowbuilder) but the number of people that started a flowbuilder conversation... And of whom we were able to answer their question using automated answers.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add in a flow step with options. It's never presented in the flow panel and there's nothing to "add" options anywhere that I can. What am I missing?
This is exactly what I want to do, but this article doesn't seem to cover it and I cannot find any options whatsoever to indicate how I am supposed to set this up. How can I set it up so that if someone asks the answerbot any question with the word "returns" in it, it replies with a specific response?
@... I've had the same problem. But I think I've figured it out... I think you are trying to add this options step between two steps that you have already set up? That's when I had this issue. My solution won't make you happy... but I removed all the steps following after where I wanted the new options step to be. So that this new options step was the bottom step in the branch. If you choose 'add step' then, you will find that the options step is available. A lot of work (when there are a lot of steps to delete and add later, and with a copy-paste option missing ;-)) Wish you luck!
@... Is it possible to add a numeric ticketfield or a ticket fiels (multiple lines) with the transferring to an agent step? These field don't seem to appear in the dropdownlist. This would be very useful to eg ask customers for their customerid or phonenumber and asking them to explain their question in more then 128 characters (single line).
@... one last question (for today ;-) In the fall/feedback flow we see the option 'start over', Is is possible to add the option 'start over' to our customized flow as well? And if so, can we select where this 'start' should be? In the fall/feedbackflwow this is always at the top (welcome to <company name>). We'd prefer 'start over' to start somewhere else in the flow, eg. at 'How can we help/please choose your subject'. Kind regards, Ingrid van Veen
Hi team.
Back in Feb. of this year, the team had this to say
I realize that just including a link may not be the best option so another solution would be to have a designated article that informs your users how to contact your Support team. This article can include steps for submitting a request and you can hyperlink directly to your Submit a Request page if needed.
This means that the ticket will not reflect the history of which article the customer viewed. That doesn't make sense.
As a feature of this messaging function, isn't it also important in providing a smooth support response to know what articles the customer has viewed and inquired about beforehand?
In light of this, the lack of settings in the ticket field for forwarding to an agent is extremely inconvenient.
Thanks.
Hi,
I'm trying to customize the answerbot, and im unsure if it's strictly done
in Flowbuilder or I can use Triggers to get the same functionality?
If I'm only using Flowbuilder then would it support Hebrew?
Thanks
Hi,
is it possible to have more than one flow ?
Hi @...,
We have just added a new business hours condition feature to Flow Builder, so you can now configure the bot to respond differently when inside or outside of your business' operating hours. I welcome any feedback you have on how this helps solve your needs.
I have the widget set up with Answerbot and Chat although as previously mentioned it is confusing to know how they work together.
My main question now is. I have set up Flowbuilder to include the "Talk to a human" and the form to be completed before that happens. However the message "Type a message" is available at the bottom so as I found the other day it is possible for the user to ignore the "Talk to a human" and message the team directly. This means the name, email address, etc is not collected. How do I turn "Type a message" off but still keep the chat facility when connected to an agent? I had a look at your widget on this page and see the "Type a message" is not there. Can you share your setup as an example, please?
Hi Ian,
This should not be possible. When a user is presented with the "talk to a human" option, and choose to send a free-text message instead, this will prompt the bot to attempt to find a conversational shortcut. If you have configured data capture as part of the agent transfer step, it should not be possible to initiate an agent transfer without completing the required information.
It is not possible to disable free-text message entry with messaging. However, if the user continues to send messages after the bot has transferred the conversation to an agent, those messages will be captured in the conversation history and visible to the agent in the Agent Workspace once they join the conversation.
The widget on this page (at time of writing) is the classic web widget. This article and my response refers to the messaging experience. Flow Builder is only available with messaging.
I hope that helps!
Hi Juan,
Hi Yoel,
Customizing the bot is done in Flow Builder. Hebrew is not one of the language supported by the bot today. If Hebrew is the only language you wish to configure a flow in, you can try creating your flow in Hebrew and see if it meets your needs, however note that the automatic translation feature won't work, and there are certain bot messages that will fall back to English.
Thank you @...
That explains a lot. As it happens a customer used the chat when we were offline and I could see by the thread in the ticket he did indeed receive repeated messages as you describe.
While reviewing the flowbuilder I noticed that there does not appear to be an option for the customer to add an attachment when completing the form. Am I missing a setting somewhere?
i want to ask Custom Field information like Order no. from my customers in Chatbot and create a ticket with that details. how can i request custom field information?
Hi @...
You can create a custom ticket field (must be text type) to collect that additional information. You can find more information on how to do that from this article.
When will the multi-line type of custom tickets be available?
Can Flow Builder display translated articles? There are three versions of my article in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English.
I use Simplified Chinese to create Flow Builder, but my clients use English, and the articles for clients are in Simplified Chinese. My articles are in English. I don’t know how to show my English articles to English clients.
You can offer help center articles in multiple languages in the flow. You’ll need to enable those languages in your Guide settings, then add translated versions of those articles to your help center.
For more information, see Configuring your help center to support multiple languages, Localizing help center content, and Managing languages in a bot.
The article added by Answer Bot is in Simplified Chinese
If there are customers who use English to consult, the recommended articles are still in simplified Chinese, which seems very strange
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