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.
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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.
96 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.
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