Feature Request: Introduce 'Wait for Customer Response' Step to Flow Builder

Hi Rachael.

Thanks for your feedback. Have you considered using the Ask for details step? This step type will pause and wait for the end user to fill out the form, one field at a time.

The major limitation with the 'Ask for Details' step is that you can only ask for the customer to complete information which is in an existing ticket field. Often we want to gather information which we don't want to have in a ticket field.

Thanks for the insight Rachel. Out of curiosity can you share some examples of what type of information you don't want in a ticket field? 

Hi Lisa Tam,

We are looking for the same feature that Rachel Martin has proposed.  It's preventing us from adopting Zendesk Messaging at the moment.

Essentially, we want to be able to ask the customer a question using the "Send message" step in Flow Builder, and then wait for them to respond before the flow advances to the next step.

Here’s a simplified version of what we are trying to build:

How this works in practice is as follows (this example follows the unauthenticated path, but it’s the same problem either way):

Essentially, we want to wait until they have responded to the question, before transferring them to an agent (otherwise a ticket is created without the context and the agent is sitting around waiting).

A “wait for response before proceeding to next step” option on the “Send message” step would solve this, or alternatively a new step “Ask a question” or something along those lines.  Other steps such as "Present options" already exhibits similar behaviour (I.e. waiting for a response before proceeding).

In theory we could use the “Ask for details” step to populate a custom ticket field ("Enquiry" perhaps), but this doesn’t seem ideal or suited to free text and isn’t very conversational (I.e. asking the user to complete a form).  Obviously there is a place for the "Ask for details" step, but my interpretation of this would be to use it where a specific piece of information is required (such as a Name or Email Address etc) rather than potentially long-form free text.  I did try this as a workaround but couldn’t get the flow builder to recognise the custom ticket field I had added, even then it's not really an acceptable solution in my opinion.

Hope this adds some weight behind this feature request.  It does seem like an obvious omission to me and something that could be resolved fairly quickly given that fundamentally - waiting is already supported by some of the other step types (Such as "Present options").

I should add too, that in my flow example above.  If the user is already authenticated, simply opening the messaging widget will create a ticket.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. I'm keen to understand further about using the message composer to submit information rather than using the "Ask for details" form. Do you have any examples of long-form free text that wouldn't be suited for "Ask for details" form?

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for getting back to me.  At it's simplest, the example above is what we are looking to achieve, I.e.

1. "Hi Daniel, how can we help you today?"
2. [WAIT FOR RESPONSE]
3. [TRANSFER TO AGENT]

The "Ask for details" step (in my opinion) is a very robotic way of collecting open-ended or free text responses.  It doesn't feel conversational to be presented with a form field to collect this type of response.  I agree it has a place for very specific pieces of information, "Order Number", "Email Address" etc, where you'd perhaps want to process this further or have it be more machine readable to pass into other processes.

Another example would be if you want to ask multiple open-ended questions in succession, it seems cumbersome to require a custom ticket field for every possible question that you would want to ask, rather than the customer's answer just being part of the conversation (which the agent can read).

Hi Lisa,

After some further testing, I figured out why I wasn't able to get the "Ask for details" step to work with free/multi-line text, it appears that this is not supported.

The article "Why aren't all my custom fields appearing as options in the bot builder?" states:

You can only add text or drop-down custom fields to the bot builder.

I've verified this behaviour, custom fields of type "Multi-line" can't be added to the "Ask for details" step.

Just to be clear, I'm not proposing that support for "Multi-line" text fields should be added to the "Ask for details" step.

We'd think it more appropriate that the "Send message" step has an option to wait for a response (as explained in my original argument above).

Hi Lisa Tam,

Just wondering if you have any further information on whether this is on the roadmap or not?

Many thanks,
Daniel

Rachel Martin - did you ever find a solution or workaround?

Lisa Tam - would be great if you could provide an update on this, it's still a blocker for us.  Any information is appreciated.