Ways to improve your Bots 🤔

(Ryan McGuinness) #1

  1. Change the welcome message: A personal touch like a custom welcome message could be the difference between a good bot and a great bot. By default, the welcome text we provide is “Hello, this is ” You can add additional welcome text or just change the welcome text

  2. Different ways to use shortcuts: Add shortcuts that will be displayed with the welcome message. These will add buttons that match any of your flows that start with ‘new message’ keywords. Add shortcuts to questions that will allow pre-set answers to be chosen (these will also start new flows)

  3. Add persistent menus: Set up a persistent menu in the settings for your Messenger bot. This menu will be shown when the user first installs your bot, after a period of inactivity, or when the user accesses it through the menu button. To add a menu item, edit your bot, and click Persistent Menu > Add. In the left box, type the name for the menu item (what the user sees). On the right, type the keyword that will be triggered when the user clicks that option. You can click Add again to add more menu items.

  4. Adding a Catch-all: A catch-all is a trigger that fires when the user inputs text the bot wasn’t expecting or doesn’t understand and will also replace a welcome message (This can be changed in bot settings) Similar to a welcome message, a catch-all trigger is best utilized to help guide a user. A good use case would be to use a catch-all trigger with the messaging’ service, this could be used to put the user directly in touch with you if they’re asking the bot something it doesn’t understand. (Don’t forget to use a message action! This way the user knows they’re being put in contact with an agent.) You could also use a catch-all trigger with the SMTP / GMail service. This could be used as a log of queries that the bot is receiving that it doesn’t understand. (Post these to a Google sheet if you prefer!)

  5. Questions: When asking questions, provide choice answers that will be displayed as buttons. It’s worth noting that you can only send a maximum of ten buttons to a user, any more than this will cause the buttons to become plain text.( TIP: If you need more than ten buttons, you can set one of your choices to trigger another set of ten buttons! There’s also a character limit of thirty per button so keep the names brief.)

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#2

Hello,
How can I put shortcut buttons in my Welcome Text? - I don’t want to use a persistent menu.
I have a problem where I have made my greeting a catch-all trigger with buttons but it doesn’t make sense when something is said that’s not recognized by the bot.

(Karen Barker) #3

Hi Donne,

The welcome message automatically displays shortcut buttons for any keyword trigger flows you have. However if you’re using a catch-all flow the welcome message will never show to a user as they will drop into the catch-all flow instead.

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