Three things to keep in mind while configuring bots:
Don’t ask too many questions through the bot - it will put off your users resulting in a drop-off.
While conversational bots work better than forms, one of the key aspects that lead forms still have is the ability to set expectations on the number of questions ahead of time. To ensure your user isn’t frustrated and confused by the time they see the last question from the bot, make sure you give a heads-up to the user on how many questions are coming up, as a part of the bot welcome message. e.g.,“Three quick questions for context before we hand you over to one of our human agents”.
Don’t try to pretend the bot is human - that sets you up for a bad failure case. People are more forgiving of bots that say they are bots.
Campaigns are triggered based on user context. When a campaign message is delivered to a user, the user may or may not respond to the campaign message. A bot interaction kicks off when the user responds to the campaign.
Welcome messages are meant to help set context and expectations for a specific message channel. They are like sticky messages at the beginning of a conversation and do not interfere with bots or campaigns.
The bot is triggered only for new users. The bot skips flow if the user doesn’t reply within two minutes. Thus the bot won’t be able to collect information from the user if they reply after two minutes.
You cannot respond to or interrupt a bot conversation till it moves to a team member – either at the end of the conversation or after the bot engagement times out.
The bot will hand over control to a team member after all the questions have been answered or after a default time-out period of 90 seconds (when a user stops providing inputs).
The bot uses the following logic to determine if team members are online or offline:
If business hours are enabled, the bot strictly follows the business hours settings to determine if the online flow or offline flow should kick in.
If business hours are disabled, the bot follows the offline flow when all team members on the account are offline. A team member is treated as being offline if they have moved to a different tab from the Freshchat tab for over 2 minutes.
The bot interaction kicks off only when a user is unidentified. If you have set any of the following user properties on the widget - email, phone, and external_id - the bot flow will not be triggered.
The Freshchat bot can be integrated completely into the Freshsales CRM. You can opt for every lead collected to be automatically synchronized with the CRM and captured as a lead in the CRM. Other than name, email, and phone number, other custom information can also be collected by the bot and mapped to custom fields in the CRM integration option.
To learn how to setup Bots in Freshchat, check this article.
Our bot is currently in its early days and will continue to evolve and offer more customizations.
Please ping us using the Freshchat app or reach out to us at support@freshchat.com with your feedback on features or customisations that you would like us to add.
Bots help you spare your visitors and customers the trouble of manually filling pre-chat forms and reduce chat drop-off rates. They can help your team focus on conversations that actually matter and generate leads even when your team is offline by collecting quick information from your website visitors.
The Freshchat Bot is built to automate lead capture - collect user information when a visitor initiates a chat, validate responses with follow-up questions, and auto-upload the leads into the Freshsales CRM.
You can configure the bot workflows in the following ways:
Generate leads 24x7 - even when your team is offline. Let the bot exchange pleasantries, set expectations, and reduce team dependency.
Edit default questions and add relevant custom questions to set lead qualification criteria.
Create workflows for your team's online and offline scenarios to help your bot sound empathetic and personal.
With bots, you can set the right expectation on response time when your team is offline.
If you still prefer a pre-chat form over Bots, you can use a pre-chat from with Freshchat. Refer this article to set up a pre-chat form.
To set up Bots, refer this article.
Sometimes the Bots might send messages such as “Skip number …” which might not be set in bot flow when the user enters a wrong value for that field. This is because of the Named Entity Recognition(NER) that kicks in which classifies the entry. It is inbuilt in Freshchat. If the user reply is not valid, it automatically moves out of the bot flow that you set and assigns it to an Agent.
Plain text might be set as the response type in email field/phone number field. The bot might not detect wrong entry by the users in this case and thereby following incorrect bot flow accepting incorrect details from the customers. In order to avoid this check the Response type for each question set in the bot flow.
