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TABLE OF CONTENTS


Crush your goals across customer lifecycle with Custom Flows


Custom Flows can work all day, every day. Create Custom Flows to proactively start conversations, ask the right questions, qualify more leads, book meetings 24/7, onboard new users, and support customers.


You can design a fully functional Custom Flow in Freshchat in just a few minutes, without writing any complex codes. Just create simple paths for your prospects to follow and let the Custom Flow take care of the next steps like qualifying leads and assigning to the right teams.


Here's a Custom Flow example with Meetings integration.




How is Custom Flows different from other chatbots out there


Not all questions can be answered by a bot, and sometimes human intervention is crucial. Custom Flows will hand off such conversation to a human agent to speed up resolution and improve customer experience. 


If a user deviates from a question asked by Custom Flows responding with something random, Custom Flows will ask the user to rephrase the answer twice, post which the bot will automatically transfer the chat to a team member.


Design your Custom Flows


To create your first Custom Flows, Go to Chatbots > Manage Flows


Click New Custom Flow.



Give a title


Start by adding a meaningful title to your Custom Flow. You should add a title that accurately describes your bot’s goal, so your team can easily understand the bot’s purpose.




Engage potential leads who come to your website


Add a welcome message to kick start your bot conversation. The welcome message is the first message your visitors will get. You can make it easy for your visitors to respond by adding multiple answer options they can choose from.


For example, you can ask something like this:



Next, add the quick reply buttons your visitors can choose from. 





You can do this by clicking on the small '+' icon in the left and selecting Response > Quick Replies.





Pro tip: Give a name to all the steps that you create so that it is easy to identify later. For example, in the above screen, the step name is 'Welcome'.


Personalize your bot flow based on who your visitors are


Now, you can direct leads through a different set of steps (bot flow) based on their response. Just click on the drop-down beside each reply button and create a new step. Give each new step, a clear, descriptive name so it's easy to identify later.



You can see a list of all the steps you’ve created on the left side of the screen.




Qualify leads and push them to the right teams


Now, configure your new set of steps.


Custom Flows can collect any data such as someone’s email, phone number, qualifying leads faster, and creating a rich profile for every prospect. This will give your sales teams actionable insights to work with.


Apart from default response options, you can also add custom responses and get more information from your customers. 



Just add a bot message, and configure the custom response option for the data you’d like to collect, like the name of their organization, company size, IMEI number, or anything else you need. 




If you don’t already have an attribute for this value, you can create a new one, so it’s always available to your team. Just select the checkbox. The data will get stored in Freshchat as a custom user property.




You can even personalize the bot responses within the bot flow using the data you collect, by adding placeholders. 



Direct people to the next step based on their response


You can guide people through the next steps based on their responses. Instead of adding data fields, you can end a step with reply buttons, creating new bot flows.




Add follow up actions and close the loop on the conversation 


At the end of each step, you can set up follow up actions, based on who your users are. 




NoteThe lightning bolt icon will let you add a follow up action while the branch icon will allow you to link a new step with the current one.


For example, you can assign high-quality leads (with more than 1000 employees) to your Priority Sales team and share your Sales team’s calendar to schedule a meeting(coming soon) with one of them.





And for people who are just browsing, you can set up the bot to automatically close the conversation, so it doesn’t distract your team from more important tasks.




Here are the other follow up actions Custom Flow can do:


  • Make the conversation available for Assignment - The conversation will be pushed to the new conversations view and based on Assignment Rules or IntelliAssign it will be assigned to a team member or group.

  • Loop in Freddy Answer Bot - For instance, if you have a Custom Bot flow to schedule a demo with a new user, and if the user responds with a ‘No’, you can transfer the conversation to Freddy Answer Bot, and the Freddy Answer Bot can continue helping the customer.

  • Create a ticket in Freshdesk (if the integration is enabled) and close the conversation in Freshchat .



Preview your Custom Flow and take it live


Take a peek at your entire bot flow with ‘Overview’. 





Or see a ‘Preview’ of how your bot will work in real-time by interacting with it, right from your Custom Flow setup page. Just click Overview or Preview in the top right corner.



Once you are happy with your design, you can take the bot live and launch it with Freddy Answers, Campaigns or on and start interacting with customers. You can also choose when you want to trigger it.


Make your conversational bot more personal


Build personalized bot conversations to better connect with your customers and get higher engagement on your questions. Use user properties and customer data as placeholders to personalize your conversations. Ask your customers about the weather in their region or prompt them to move to a higher plan. The options are limitless. 


       


How do Custom Flows work in a new conversation (Topics)


Once you’ve finished designing your Custom Flows, you can choose where and when you want your bot to trigger. 


You can create several Custom Flows for different kinds of customer queries and Topics. For example, you can create a Custom Flow to qualify leads and trigger it on your Sales Enquiries Topic or a Custom Flow for support and launch it on your Customer Support Topic.



Trigger your bot to engage at a time that works for you  

For example:


  • If you have a sales qualification bot, you can trigger it during your office hours, when your team is available to reply. 
  • Or, if you have an out of office bot, you can trigger it outside of your office hours, so you can generate leads, even when your team is away.  


When a customer starts a conversation with you on the messenger, the Custom Flow will trigger and start interacting. 


Customers can then clarify why they’re reaching out, and provide additional information without needing to wait for a response from your team, or take up their time.



Proactively engage, support, and sell with Custom Flows (Campaigns)


You can trigger Custom Flow with campaigns to proactively start conversations and engage, nurture, onboard, and upsell users.


Here are some examples of the powerful ways you can use Custom Flows with Campaigns:


  • Book meetings with high-intent users: Automatically invite users to book a meeting with your Sales team after they show intent, such as viewing your plan upgrade page.

  • Provide proactive support: Onboard new users, help customers set up a feature, or educate them on the value they can get by using a feature.

  • Upsell customers: Grow your business by encouraging customers to try features from higher plans.

  • Announce launches and updates: Launch new features to users in a fun and engaging way with a video campaign, followed by a Custom Flow to answer any questions.


Here’s how you can launch bot campaigns.


Trigger a Bot Campaign


You can set up your bot campaign just like a Triggered Message. 


Go to the Campaigns menu. Select New Campaigns > Triggered Message > Trigger a Bot.



Here, instead of a team member, you will pick a Custom Flow for this Campaign. Once launch this campaign, the Custom will trigger and start engaging your users.




Book Meetings with Custom Bots


Automate demo requests and book meetings proactively with Meetings (Google Calendar) + Custom Bots. Here's how you can do this,




Did you know?


You can create Multilingual Custom Flows in up to 35 global languages. To know more, Click here.