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How to account for a variable/unknown number of customer replies when building a custom bot

  • 25 April 2022
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Hello,

 

We're trying to use a custom bot to offer users a way to submit simple bug reports from within our app (although this question applies to our other custom bots as well)

 

We are building the bot using the standard builder but a problem encountered in testing is that users might take 2 or 3 replies to describe a bug, and our bot triggers a response message after only 1 customer reply. If we set the bot to reply after 2 or 3 customer inputs, there's a risk that a customer never gets a reply if they only used 1 message to express their issue, or that a customer who expresses their issue in 4 messages gets a disjointed and clumsy bot reply right in the middle.

 

Our flow is a prompt to describe the bug, then a user response, then a thank you message from the bot.

 

How have other users gotten around this? Grateful for any pointers!

 

 

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Best answer by Magnus 1 June 2022, 00:52

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Hey @ayad​ 👋

 

If you'd like to write in through the Messenger with the URL of the Custom Bot you are currently creating, we can take a look into this for you and try to offer some suggestions/workarounds 🙌

Hey @ayad​, I have one suggestion that could work!

 

You can set up the bot to ask for bug details, then offer one reply box. After the reply, offer up two different paths with reply buttons:

 

  1. One that says "I'd like to add more info"
  2. One that says "I'm done adding info"

 

Then let the first lead to some kind of "done" path - like the Bot saying "Thanks for logging the issues with us!".

The second one can lead to a path that only includes another text area (no bot message) and two more options. Have those options be the same type of options as previously: One "done" option and one "more info" option.

 

The "done" option can lead to the same ending path, but the second "More info" will have to lead to an additional "more info" path. This is because Paths are not allowed to loop to themself, but two paths can loop to each other.

 

This will ensure that every user can leave as much info as they need - it's especially useful for users that would otherwise accidentally write one message when they really wanted to submit a lot more info. I hope this helped as a workaround for your use case!

 

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