In the coming weeks we'll be rolling out new, advanced automation capabilities that make it easy for your teams to spin up bots in minutes, right out of the box.
In this article, we’ll introduce the following upcoming features:
You can also watch the following video for an introduction to these features:
Improved bot building experience
We’re introducing an improved bot experience to help teams build smarter bots with less effort.
With this new experience, admins no longer have to maintain a single, long and complex flow. You’ll have the ability to create separate Answer flows the bot can use to address individual customer topics. When a customer requests assistance, the bot goes to work by matching and delivering relevant answers to customer questions before an agent gets involved.
This new experience will also allow admins to train their bot by adding common phrases customers may use to describe their intent to ensure the bot matches incoming questions to the right answer, every time.
You’ll also have more control over how you greet your customers by quickly making changes or highlighting seasonal topics.
This new bot building experience will be available later in Q2.
Connect bots to external systems
We’re adding a new, powerful step type to Flow Builder to allow you to connect your bot to external systems. Admins will be able to configure a Make an API call step that allows your bot to surface data, like subscription ID or order status, into a bot’s response that is stored from an external system, such as an internal CRM or an enterprise resource planning product. It can also be used to send events, such as emitting events to Google Analytics or Pendo.
This feature will be available later in Q2.
Flow Builder for social channels
Flow Builder is expanding beyond our native messaging capability, allowing you to add your conversational bot to the third party social channels you’ve connected to your Zendesk account, including Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram Direct, Twitter DM, and WeChat.
You can connect your social channels to a bot in a number of ways:
- Add a live, published bot with a single click
- Publish an existing but currently unused bot to those channels
- Create a new bot specifically for your social channels
This feature is currently available as an Early Access Program. See Flow Builder support for social messaging (Early Access Program).
While we’re completing development of these features, start creating your own conversational bot with Flow Builder. See Using Flow Builder to create bot flows.
10 Comments
This is exciting. Great update!
It would be great to have the topics nested in categories to avoid a cluttered welcome message.
Hi
May i please know when this Make API Call feature will be available in EAP?
Expected month?
Thanks.
About connecting bots to external systems, what's planned to manage the received responses, as to parse and apply conditional logic?
Also, how will those be logged for audits & troubleshooting?
Apparently the Make an API Call step launched just yesterday, which is great.
But is there any information as to when we can expect the improved Flow Builder experience and especially the "Collect information" step. The latter is almost a necessity to work with the Make an API Call step.
Also is there any news about adding tags to a ticket depending on answers selected throughout the flow? This could help with Ticket routing a lot.
Hello,
New features are good!!, but, when will it be possible to connect a flow from a BOT to whatsapp, I made a simple flow with the "Transfer to agent" connector I have tried to get name, email and custom field information and this did not work for me.
Hey Shameen Rana
The feature was rolled out last week, and this should be available in your account.
Rafael Santos
There are plans for us to introduce a new conditional step into flow builder later this year so that you can start building personalized bot experiences.
In terms of logs and troubleshooting, the ones for Make API steps are available inside Integration logs in Flow Builder
Shayan M
Great question. We are in the process of revamping the data collection experience; with the upcoming release, you will be able to configure the bot to collect information anywhere in the flow and use this data as input parameters for making API calls.
We are also working on a piece of work that allows you to pass bot context(ie options clicked) to agent workspace for better routing and triaging
Roberto Salinas E.
RIght now, there is a limitation where forms are not supported on social channels. We plan to address this problem later on this year
Hi Shiyu Zhu
Thanks for letting know.
I was just testing this feature and have a question regarding it.
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