In recent weeks we've rolled 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 new features:
You can also watch the following video for an introduction to these features:
Improved bot building experience
We’ve introduced 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 answers 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 also allows 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 also have more control over how you greet your customers by quickly making changes or highlighting seasonal topics.
This new bot building began rolling out on May 31, 2022, and will be available to all customers within two weeks. See Building a bot using answers.
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 is available now. See Using the Make an API call step in Flow Builder.
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 now available. See Using Flow Builder to create a social messaging bot.
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.
27 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 Moussawi
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.
Hello Shiyu Zhu,
Are there any plans for translation of the flow steps? This currently presents a major issue, as we do not want to rely on automatic translations for our customers as those aren't particularly up to our standard, and dynamic content doesn't seem to work in flow builder.
We currently work around this by using a different brand for each language, however this bears the problem that linking Help center articles doesn't work, because we cannot connect multiple brands to a single help center.
Just being able to setup multiple Bots and Web Widgets for a single Brand would also help greatly with this. (Thinking about it, this would really help, and I do not quite understand why this limitation currently exists, setting up multiple web widgets per Brand would allow for so much easier handling of multi-language content, also it would allow translation of the opening hours and Bot name, is there any reason this limit exists?)
Also in regards to social messaging: Unfortunately the video is misleading. As social messaging still seems to suffer the following restrictions: (unless of course these restrictions will be removed after the rollout) are there plans to integrate these features into social messaging? Especially the lack of a Greeting message, seems like a major problem. At the very least after interacting with the social channel, the customer should be presented with the initial Greeting flow.
EDIT:
Also, we just received the release. And unfortunately the "Collect information" does not seem to be included. Will this be rolled out at a later date?
Shiyu Zhu this feature hasn't rolled out to my accounts. Is there a delay?
Hi Dan,
Which feature are you referring to? If it's the improved bot building experience, this is currently being rolled out across the regions and will complete by end of this week. Social channels support and Connect bots to external system is already available.
"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"
Hello, any news on this one? Not being able to identify the specific flow and/or options selected in Agent Workspace is a major blocker, especially if configuring dozens of answers whose flows are to be reassigned to multiple Groups.
Hi Pedro,
It's planned for H2. In the interim, there is a workaround where you can use data capture and support triggers to route the end-user to a specific group.
Hi Lisa Tam, thanks for the quick reply! We already tried and know it's possible to do this using custom fields (as with a web form), but by using those we defeat the purpose of having Answers in Flow Builder.
Edit: in the meantime, here's the workaround I use
We only want to use custom fields for custom Answers, not to design the overall experience from the start... Thank you for the sharing the workaround, looking forward to the complete routing experience 🙂
Hello Lisa Tam and Shiyu Zhu!
I hope that everybody are very well.
In our sponsored environments and in our clients' environments, when building a flow, we are not seeing the "Collect Information" option. Is this option already available to be used? or hasn't been released for use yet?
Would you be so kind to tell us how you can see that option?
Thank you very much in advance and have a great day!
Lisa Tam Thank you for offering the workaround. Yet, I hope the "collect information" step will be available soon to enable collecting the information for social messaging, where forms are not supported.
Also, the flow tagging step is something we drool about.
Any updates on the release schedule of both the Collect Information and Custom Feedback? I am a new customer with a tight timeline (end of July) and am debating classic vs flow builder/messaging. Leaning towards the latter, but it is unusable in my use case without these features.
Dear Lisa Tam !
I can see that instead of Collect Information step "Ask for detais" step was released. Yet it does not work for Social Messaging and SunCo mobile SDKs.
Are there still plans to bring "Collect Information" functionality for Social messaging as advertised in the video in this article?
Hi Anton,
Yes we absolutely have plans to support Collect information support for Social Channel and our teams are currently working on it right now. At this stage, it looks like it will be available in Q4.
Lisa Tam quick question before we set up flow builder.
Is the information collection portion required for pre authenticated usage? What I mean by that is if a user interacts with the bot of whom is already authenticated by Zendesk, can we pull in those user properties from the start or do we have to ask the user for information despite already knowing who they are?
Hope that makes sense.
Hi Wesley Bowles,
Yup! Once they are authenticated they won't need to fill up the form. I would suggest checking out this documentation for admins for setting up the end-user authentication in Messaging, and also this developer document as well. Hope this helps!
Is it possible to reference attributes from an authenticated end-user in the flow builder? For example, if an authenticated end-user begins interacting with the chat bot, would it be possible to use the API connector and input variables associated with the end-user's profile (ie email address, external ID, or other custom attributes)?
@Danny Koss +1 to this.
I believe this is planned for H1 2023 -- see our product manager Shiyu Zhu's comment in this thread: Using the Make an API call step in Flow Builder
Lisa Tam
any update on this:
"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"
In June you mentioned H2.
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