Leave room for human conversation within a messenger bot

(François) #1

Hello there,

I am setting up a bot for messenger, but I am encountering a great issue. I am asking a few questions to the user, but I want to keep the possibility of having a direct, human conversation (through messenger) open.

There is a flow “Talk to a human” which is convenient, but as soon as I (manually) respond to a user’s direct (talking-to-a-human) question, then, if the user wants to answer back, the bot starts again. This doesn’t allow room for a direct and personal conversation with a user, which is a bummer.

Is there a way to leave room for such a conversation ?

Many, many thanks !

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(Anish Duggal) #2

Hi Francois,

This conversation about conversation threads is also happening over here:

There may be something that can help you there. There are a lot of us waiting for a solution for this and the FlowXo team is working on it.

Hope this helps.

2 Likes
#3

I haven’t tried yet but I think you can do as following:

  1. Create a flow to set an attribute (such as: livechat)
    When an user want to talk to a human, set it as ON
    When the user don’t want to talk anymore, set it as OFF
  2. Then in your catch-all trigger, use filter {{attributes__livechat}} Equals OFF
(Anish Duggal) #4

Going to try this version tomorrow. Thanks @yappa

(Khashayar) #5

I overcame this issue like this:

1/ User asks for help
2/ Bot > ask question > “what you say next will be emailed to the support team”
3/ Messaging > Send Email > send email with the answer of 2 as the body — with a shortcut that says ‘reply to human’
4/ Bot says: 'Sent! They’ll get back to you here"
5/ Support agent sees the email, replies within Gmail
6/ When the reply appears in chat for the user, it has a quick reply saying ‘reply to human’
7/ If the person types anything else that ‘reply to human’ the bot will answer - if the person says or taps ‘reply to human’ then a new flow will be triggered and cycle repeats from step 2

Like this, they can ask follow up question only when they want to, after reading your message.

We’ve been using this and people say it feels natural. It’s easy to understand it seems

(Justin Ruckman) #6

I found a solution that works for my setup anyway.

I repurposed the “Welcome & Help” demo, which is a catch-all flow.

The trick is that the only actions I have are welcome messages, and they all have the filter (applied individually to each message) of message = start OR message = /start. And then there’s nothing else in the catch-flow that actually applies to the remainder of situations.

Doing this in combination with turning the welcome message off “even if there’s a catch-all message” means that I get to serve up a welcome message with a menu of options for first time visitors, but then any other language entered later that doesn’t exactly match a trigger keyword simply gets ignored (vs getting the welcome/default response).

I also narrowed the specificity of my trigger keywords by adding filters for those flows that requires a message = the exact keywords I want (vs. Flow’s default behavior of loosely-matching them).

The end result is I can have the bot chime in only exactly when I want to (at start, and at specific keywords), and otherwise the channel is open to human conversation.

2 Likes
(John Jackson) #7

This may be of interest to those of you contributing on this thread, we added a human takeover template and a write up here:

1 Like