Understanding bot flow step types

Send message displays a piece of text to the customer during a conversation.

Usage:

Send message inserts a predefined piece of text into the conversation. It can be a greeting, useful information about your business, or an automated direct reply in response to end user free-text messages and quick reply option selection.

Configuration rules:

Message steps can be added anywhere in your flow. After they're displayed, they move the conversation immediately to the next step in the flow.

Table 1.

Flow Builder view	Customer view

Example:

In the example below, the customer entered “Receiving error ‘unsupported platform’” which triggered the automated reply about supported platforms. That reply was configured in Flow Builder as a send message step; the messaging bot assessed the customer's free-text entry, identified that preconfigured message as the most likely to address the customer's needs, and moved the conversation to that step in the flow:

Present options displays up to six preconfigured quick replies that the customer can interact with during a conversation.

Usage:

This step displays up to six preconfigured quick reply options that can be offered to your customers during a conversation, allowing them to select a likely response rather than typing it in.

These options can be used to represent commonly-asked questions, branch the conversation, or help your customers navigate through a conversation flow. You can drag-and-drop options in the Configuration panel to reorder them.

Configuration rules:

You cannot end a flow with a Present options step – it must be followed by one of the other step types, which must be also configured before you can publish and move on to another step. In the example below, three options are followed by a Show help center article step, and one by a Transfer to agent step.

Table 2.

Flow Builder view	Customer view

Example:

In the example below, a customer is contacting a scooter sales and rental company. Because the company knows that most customers want information on buying, selling, or renting a scooter, after the initial greeting they immediately offer three options:

Note that as a result of conversational shortcuts, typing the message “I want to buy a scooter” in the example above will have the same effect as clicking the quick reply.

Show help center articles presents up to six help center articles to the customer during a conversation.

Usage:

Configuration rules:

A maximum of six articles can be configured per step.

Only articles visible to everyone can be included in this step. See Creating and editing articles in the knowledge base for information on article permissions.

To use this type of step, you must have an active help center with publicly-available articles.

Table 3.

Flow Builder view	Customer view

Example:

In the example below, the customer selected a quick reply option, "I want to buy a scooter", and received a specific article recommendation in response, which also included the text responses prior to the recommendation:

Transfer to agent escalates the conversation to an agent.

Usage:

Adding in this step hands off the conversation to a human agent. For Web Widget implementation, it can also be used to collect information about the customer prior to an escalation.

Configuration rules:

In this step, you can configure:

• An initial message.
• Ticket fields (text or dropdown types only; other field types aren't available) to capture customer data, such as name and email, as well as other information that can be helpful to agents entering the conversation.

Note: To use text and dropdown ticket fields in a flow, permissions for those fields must be set to Editable for end users. See Adding a custom ticket field for agents and end users.

• A final message displayed after those details are entered.

Add a business hours condition allows you to use your schedule to branch the conversation.

Usage:

This step can be used to configure the bot to respond differently based on your business availability. Adding this step will split the flow into two branches:

Configuration rules:

You must set a schedule in order to include a business hours condition step. Once you have set a schedule, you will see a preview of your business hours in the configuration panel, to indicate when customers would be sent down the open or closed branch depending on the time of day. Note that holidays are not shown in the preview, but will be respected by the condition.

If you have set multiple schedules (available on Enterprise plans only), a dropdown will appear in the configuration panel to select the appropriate schedule.

You cannot end a flow with a business hours condition step. It must be followed by one of the other step types, which must be configured before you can publish. In the example below, the business hours condition step is followed by a Transfer to agent step in both the open and closed branch. The message content is configured differently in each branch.

Table 5.

Flow Builder view	Customer view (When open)	Customer view (When closed)

Example:

In the example below, the agent transfer step is configured differently when open and closed to explain what will happen next in each context:

Table 6.

End user experience during business hours	End user experience outside of business hours