Triggering Flows during Questions

(Michael Shillingford) #1

Hi guys,

One of the issues I’m seeing in interactions with my bot currently is that users are attempting to “change the subject” whilst the bot is waiting for a response to a Question.

For example, the user will follow a flow and get into a Question, then decide that they want to do something entirely different. For example:

  1. Welcome
  2. User enters “Make a booking” flow
  3. Bot asks a question as part of that flow
  4. User decides that what they actually need is directions to the toilet, and types “where is the toilet”
  5. Bot doesn’t recognises this as an answer to the question rather than the trigger to a different, existing flow

Is there any way out of this rabbit hole?

1 Like
(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi Michael,

There’s not really a way around this at the moment unfortunately. Once the bot asks a question it will always expect to receive an answer or for the user to skip the question (if enabled). The user could also quit out of the flow by saying ‘bye’ or ‘quit’.

(Michael Shillingford) #3

That’s a shame. I’m really seeing this happen quite often, so I wonder if there’s something in my design that’s causing users to behave this way.

It’d be ace to have a feature within the Questions tool that ignores certain keywords and treats them as triggers instead. There’s no way a user would say “toilet” whilst intending to make a booking, so no reason why my bot should treat any message containing “toilet” as a response to that question in the booking flow. I just wish I could tell the bot that!

M

(Sarah Palombo) #4

@Michael_Shillingford

I agree with that suggestion - that would be nice :+1:

For now the only thought I had would be to let them quit the question in a more obvious way. something like using choice questions giving the user options

[Answer 1] [Answer 1] [Quit]

The [Quit] could be just adding an action to trigger a menu flow or something

I don’t know if that would work.

Sarah :slight_smile:

1 Like