Let's create your first chatbot flow together!

Once you log into the chatbot builder you will see the different parts of the application.
You can create Flows, Auto-Responses and Persistent Menu

Welcome message and it's content 

You will come to a dashboard with a welcome message. The welcome message (or any messages for that matter) can contain so-called variables. You can rewrite the welcome message as you see fit. To any message you can even add variations, so the person talking to chatbot would have some variety and enrichment in the communication.

Variables panel 

Variables can help you build a customized experience for your customers. For example, once you ask them for their address or any information you see fit, the Chatbot will memorize this data. During the chat session the Chatbot can use this data to customize the customer’s experience in a text-based email or use it within your integrated system (like storing the data in your CRM) for example:

BOT: Hello Alex, how are you today? Can we have your address?
ALEX: Awesome Street 3, New York
BOT: Great, thanks! I see that the nearest store is just a 10-minute walk. Do you need directions?

The list of Facebook native variables can be found on the right side of the dashboard. Or you can create your own.

Buttons

Feel free to add a button. We recommend it to have a maximum of 15 characters, preferably less. The shorter the better. Facebook allows you to display up to 3 buttons. A button can lead to a link or a flow.

Folders panel

You want to lead you message/buttons to a new flow or a link of your own. If you want it to lead to flow, you need to create one. You can do so by clicking on the “Add flow button”. A new flow will automatically appear.

 

Flow content

You can fill your flows with various content by clicking on the + round button. Have a look at all the content that you can have in your flow. We already showed you the text and button. Now, let's have a look at Rich content aka Multimedia.

Rich content

Your chatbot can send an image, video, audio or basically any other file up to 15MB file size. Just choose the one you like. To send. You can drag and drop the file or browse for it on your computer.

Gallery

Choose the gallery if you want your chatbot to offer the client various deals or categories. You can accompany every choice with a nice picture, a headline and a description. Don't forget to add a button underneath each option.

Have a look at the example below:

Menu

Another way how to offer the clients a choice of more option, but for some reason, you wouldn't want to use a gallery or a simple message + button, you can set up a menu with up to 3 buttons. Again, Facebook limits us to 3 buttons, so keep that in mind while creating a menu. The difference from the gallery is basically the verticality of buttons rather than having the options displayed horizontally.

Gathering information

We already introduced the variations you can use in your messages, to customize the experience for your customers. However, the attributes can also be used for data gathering, storing it and then including the data in an email for example.  Have a look at the example below. There are the variables %company% and %position% that we created in the chatbot builder because we would want to know this information for later purposes.

 After the chatbot gathers such data, you can use the variables to summarize what the customer provided and send an email, for example to your sales team.

Attributes

You can not only gather the information actively from the customer and store the attributes, but also set attribute values based on the customers’ interaction with the chatbot.

Here’s an example: You want to passively store information about the customer segment to use them later. By adding the attribute value at the beginning of a flow, you can track that the customer is in the VIP segment and that they are using Apple products. Now we can send these values to our CRM system and boost our upsell potential by using them to tailor the communication with the customer.

Send email

Once you have all the data gathered, you can redirect the flow to a new one that would send an email with such info. Once again, you would click the + button and choose the “Send email” function.

Fill in all the information variables and the e-mail content that you would like to send and of course don't forget the recipient's address.

Quick replies

If you want the chatbot to ask your customer a question with a couple of implied responses a good functionality to use is “Quick replies”. The good thing is, that when compared to a message with a button, you can offer more than 3 options to choose from. Have a look at the picture below.

Handover to agent

It might happen that the person chatting to chatbot might not be satisfied with the given answers or simply have some more complex issue to discuss and might want to request to be served by a human agent. That's ok. Chatbot can handover the case to the agent in no time. In the flows, you simply click the round + button and choose the option “Handover”.

Business Hours

In case you want to use the chatbot only when the agents are not available you can add the business hours button. The business hours follow your setup in Brand Embassy settings.
Simply add the button and chose to which flow or link should it lead when within the Business Hour and outside of them.

This can prevent the customer from choosing to be handed-over when there aren’t any agents are available. If that is the case, we suggest the chatbot specifying the business hours so the customer can come back :)

Typing Indicator

This plugin should allow you to provide a better conversation experience to your customers. Let them know, when your chatbot is processing data (thinking) or that he received their input and is preparing a complex answer.

To add it, simply click on Typing Indicator button:

And choose for how long should the indicator be visible to the end user.

There you go, we build ou first flow using all the buttons!

In the next part, we will talk about the Auto-responses and persistent menu