"Ask a question" with buttons and custom reply handling

(Alexander Prismotrov) #1

I setup “Ask a question” with several buttons. And I want to handle custom user reply. How can I do that?

(Karen Barker) #2

Hi Alexander,

Unfortunately it isn’t possible if you use the “Choice” option of a question to enable a custom user reply as well. The best way to handle this is to have one of the choice options to be “Other”. You can then have another question which is “Text” only that prompts the user for their custom response. This action would need to be filtered on the answer to the choice question being “Other”.

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(Alexander Prismotrov) #3

Thank you for reply. Now I will summarize the current problem:
When user enter some text, which we cannot recognize, we send him message:
“I don`t know what you are talking about. Please describe that in other words or send question to support”.
With this message we give 2 buttons:
“Describe in other words” and “Send question to support”

If user clicks “Describe in other words” button - everything is just fine. But some users will not click any button, but start typing their question http://prntscr.com/j6qld5 . And whatever the question will be, they get one message: “Sorry, I did not understand your answer. Please type the question”. http://prntscr.com/j6qlmv .

I suppose it is a problem because it makes more difficult for user to communicate with bot.

Is there any way to avoid this problem? As far as I understand I cannot handle user responce to message with buttons (if Im not right, please correct me). Maybe I can somehow show user, that he shouldnt type his message (for example just block text input area, like it can be done in Telegram)? Any ideas?

(Daniel Beckett) #4

Hi @lofti

Once the bot asks a question it always expects a response based on the question type. For example, if the question type is text it will expect the user to type a response. If the question type is choice the user will need to select from the options on screen to continue. There’s not currently a way to set a question to enable both types of responses so unfortunately the user needs to react in the way that the bot is expecting.

As part of the question setup you can specify a custom validation message where you could explain to the user that they must choose one of the buttons. You can do this by editing the question and typing a message in the field for Custom Validation Message.