You can use the bot 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 bot builder UI and basic functionality. For information about working with the bot builder, see Building a conversation bot using answers.
This article includes the following topics:
The bot builder UI
The bot builder is the tool you use to create answers for your bot, which controls how it behaves in response to customer input.
The bot builder components are listed below. Each plays an important role in building your answer:
- Header, which appears at the top of the screen, above the flow. On the header, you'll find breadcrumbs for the answer's bot as well as the Preview and Done buttons. For more information, see Publishing bot updates.
- 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 answer, or pan to areas in the answer, 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 type of bot step 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. Here, you can configure 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 the bot 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 the answer, before releasing it to your customers. Click the Preview tab in the Configuration panel to view.
Publishing bot updates
Any changes made in the bot builder must be published before they appear in your messaging channel.
To publish a bot update
- Create or update your answers in the bot builder, and click Save.
- In the header, click Publish. This makes the changes live in your messaging channels, and updates the publishing information in the header.
For more information about publishing, see Publishing answers.
106 Comments
Can anyone help with how to loop back to start over if a user has decided they would like to ask another question once they have selected 'yes' to 'does this answer your question?' - our configuration displays one last message to say 'Feel free to close this chat...While you are here, why not take a look at our available Boxes?'. However, if they then decide they have more questions do they have to completely come out of the chat and click back in to start over?
Hi Lucy Husband
The "start over" function used to be part of feedback flow changes, but the automated "Start over" option is no longer available. If you want to keep this functionality and are not using a greeting message, you can guide end users to navigate to the start by typing in a key phrase. More information can be found here.
Hello! I want to activate Flow builder for our widget but I have few questions:
1) What happens if the user asks for something that is not pertinent? So in the case the bot is not trained. Does the boot provide random information (for example, a random bunch of articles that are the closest to the request) or say that it cannot find the answer? Is there a way to personalize eventually the "not found" message?
2) Is it possible to "auto-populate" the user request? So, when the user starts to write he can see already the possible options.
3) Is it possible to configure it in the way that it already provides some options to the user based on the page the widget is? For example, the widget is on the Order&Checkout page. The user opens the widget and there is a message saying "How can we help you today?" and he already sees some options - order is blocked, payment is not working, I want to cancel an item, etc...
Many thanks as usual!
Hi, we would like to enable messaging to be able to use the flow builder with the bot, so we can make it easier for users to self-serve and suggest answers. However, we don't have the capacity to offer live support yet.
If the customer says they are still having issues, is it possible to refer them to fill out one of our forms and submit a ticket instead of connecting to a human and having direct messaging?
Thanks
hey Rebeca Hernandez,
As far as I'm aware, you're not able to link the new messaging widget to ticket forms.
I wish you could however I'm pretty sure this ability doesn't exist yet. :(
Best,
Amie
If the bot will not see anything related to your customer's query, it will ask your users to rephrase it.
As of the moment, it's not possible to auto populate the options. You can utilize intent so that your customers will automatically be routed to the correct flow based on keywords. This can also be used to display the most common concern that your customers might have.
We have been using the older web widget in both our help center and apps as the last time I played with flower builder it did not have feature parity with the classic web widget.
I am interested to see if this is the case now.
There were 2 major issues we had back in 2021 -
A. With Flow Builder all roads lead to sending you to an agent even if one wasn't available. The way we function we need to allow users to request a callback, live chat or leaving a message. Are these options now available in flow builder? This needs to be true on both web and in app and we currently have this functionality with the classic widget.
B. Flow Builder was unable to pay any attention to business hours, has this been resolved? Additionally, can it display a chat button when an agent is available and make it disapear when an agent isn't?
I am also interested in any future collaborations with any LLM AI services.
Thank you,
Jon
Jon Simone Yes both are now solved.
A. Yes, you can use the send a message step at the end of flows.
B. It will obey business hours. You can use that at the beginning and the end of a flow. Good note towards the end here. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408822398106-Creating-a-schedule-with-operating-hours
Hi! Is there programmatic access available to the flow builder, i.e. an API? I couldn't find anything at https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference.
Hi Tuule, there is not at this time and I'm not sure if that's something that's on any roadmap. If you have a good use-case for this, I'd recommend posting in the product feedback forum so that the correct people can get eyes on it!
As all our bot building will originally be built within Sandbox is there anyway to currently export/copy the content to Production?
If this is not possible now is there plans in the near future to have this feature available to us?
I can picture this being extremely problematic to accounts which require a large selection of answers and options - recreating this from scratch in production doesn't seem feasible in this use case!
hey Dylan Lopez
There's no way to copy content from the sandbox to production via the click of a button. You would need to potentially look at using the API to do any type of copying at the moment.
The other option would be to use a service like https://www.salto.io which can sync a prod & sandbox account together.
I do hear there are plans to release a feature to allow for sandbox content to be pushed back to production however when that gem might fruit, no one really knows.
Hope this helps. :)
We're using the bot on our Android devices, but we can't find an intuitive way to close/refresh the chat widget after it's transferred to an agent.
Can you provide documentation or instructions on how to close/refresh the bot at the end of the flow?
Amie (successcx) : Do you know by any chance what bot they are using at Dan Murphy's? https://www.danmurphys.com.au/dm/home
Similarly to AnswerBot is it possible via messaging and flowbuilder to analyse the interactions our customers had with the flowbuilder bot that we deflected and it didn't turn into a ticket directly?
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