Setting Up Bots

For each channel you can define in the Bot During Work Hours and Bot Outside Work Hours fields a bot that will be activated when a SimpleChat conversation is received on that channel (depending on the work hours defined for the channel and the business closures), and set up a Completion Bot that will be activated when the conversation is completed, for example to ask the customer to fill out a satisfaction survey. An agent can also activate a conversation bot during the conversation proactively, using quick-selection templates, as explained under the Setting up quick answer templates section, and a bot can also be triggered as part of a business process using the CRM workflow mechanism, as explained in the SDK documentation.

Note: The bot will only run on private channels, not on a public channel such as Facebook.

The bot itself is made up of a collection of questions presented to the customer, and depending on the type of question defined, the bot may either expect an answer for the customer to type, or the bot may show the customer a list of options to choose from, or the bot may perform an action, such as sending the customer an OTP (One Time Password) identification request, sending a file upload request or sending a request for the customer's current location. Depending on the customer's answer to the question asked or the customer's choice from the options presented to him the customer will be presented with a follow-up question defined for the selected answer.

For each question the bot progresses according to the result obtained, if a correct answer is received or selected it will proceed to the follow-up operation On Success, if an incorrect answer is received or selected the bot will repeat the question repeatedly until reaching a defined amount of retires, and afterwards will proceed to the follow-up operation Invalid Answer, if the customer did not respond and the threshold time set for the bot expired, the bot will proceed to the follow-up action operation No Response, and if in the first place the bot did not find any option to present to the customer (for example, it pulled out a list of branches in the area and no branch was found) the bot will proceed to the follow-up operation No Options.

Whatever the outcome, the bot will act on the follow-up action it is set to perform for the follow-up operation, such as Continue Bot to perform the next action (e.g., asking the next question or performing an identification process), Exit Bot to end the bot and pass the conversation to an agent, Mark as Complete to close the conversation with Completed status or Cancel Activity to cancel the activity.

A question can be static, that is, it contains a set of predefined answers, and it can be dynamic, that is, it contains retrievable responses from the system, such as selecting from the customer's open cases, whether through a saved view or a query (FetchXML), and the query can also be filtered based on previous answers, such as selecting a branch from the branches in the city that the customer specified in a previous question, and the dynamic question can have additional static answers, such as "Another branch". In chat and Facebook the options will be presented to the user as cards to choose from, with a title, description, image and link.

A question can also be an open-ended question, such as "On what date were you born?" Or "What is your age?", and you can set different paths for the bot according to the answer received, such as one path to continue in case the customer is still a minor (not yet 18) and another path to continue with the customer already in adulthood (from age 18 onwards), depending on the customer's answer. You can also save the answers to desired fields in the system.

Follow the sections below to learn how to create and use bots