Message Threading - with CRM - weird results with hard coded or looked up email address

(Philip Mccarthy) #1

Hi there

I have created a Facebook Messenger chatbot. For certain situations like after hours and queries the chatbot can’t respond to I send the message to Freshdesk to be dealt with there - and suspend operation of the chat at that point.

This all works fine though the way in which the messages are threaded into existing tickets or not threaded is proving mysterious.

After several hours trial and error yesterday I managed to configure my flow to ensure messages were threaded into existing tickets or not threaded. But the way I got this to happen does not make any sense to me:

If I hard code the Freshdesk support email address directly into the ‘Email Address’ field in the "Send Message to Email’ step the threading works perfectly after that. However if I look up the Freshdesk support email address from a Google Sheet (my preferred option so the email address is only stored in one location) then the threading does not work - new tickets are created with every message.

Why would this be? Somehow the process of looking up the email address instead of reading it hard coded into the flow makes the CRM think the message needs a new ticket. Weird.

Whilst I could leverage this behavior to my advantage, the fact that I don’t understand why it works is unsettling and makes me think I could not depend of consistent results either way.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks, Phil

(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi @Philip_Mccarthy

If you check the interaction logs for your action which pulls through the email address from Google Sheets is it an exact match for the one you used for hard coding the email address?

(Philip Mccarthy) #3

Hi Daniel

I did. Here are the results from both approaches:

support@nsw-dpi-fisheries-help.freshdesk.com
support@nsw-dpi-fisheries-help.freshdesk.com
support@nsw-dpi-fisheries-help.freshdesk.com
support@nsw-dpi-fisheries-help.freshdesk.com

Each value appears identical even though two came from hard coded entries and two from google sheet lookups, I confirmed this by doing a find in MS Excel, each find attempt found all 4 entries.

Weird! Makes no sense whatsoever.

Cheers, Phil.

(Daniel Beckett) #4

Sorry but I’m having trouble recreating this one. Any chance you could take some screenshots from your Interaction Logs showing both methods?

Feel free to send through to support@flowxo.com and we’ll take a closer look there.

(Philip Mccarthy) #5

Hi Daniel

I’ve sent a detailed message through to the support email address with screenshots.

Thanks, Phil.