Features Archive - Flow XO

Provide light-hearted entertainment

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 21:34:16 +0000

Provide light-hearted entertainment

Chatbots don’t have to be serious - it’s good fun to introduce some workflows that are purely for entertainment. For example, why not tell a joke, provide funny tips or light-hearted commentary on the latest news?

The great thing about creating a chatbot with Flow XO is that you can run multiple workflows behind the scenes. Some of these workflows may be geared towards your professional service - for example, providing information on your products or allowing customers to place orders - but, you could also introduce some workflows that are for no other reason than lightening the mood.

Tell a joke

With our Google Sheet integration, your workflow could randomly pick a joke stored in a spreadsheet and present it at random during the conversation. Perhaps your chatbot needs to grab some information from another system that may take a moment - the perfect time to drop in a quick one-liner.

Provide funny tips

Tips don’t have to be serious, and actually providing a more human-like dialogue can really help build a relationship with your customer. Create a workflow that randomly drops hints and tips on using your product or service, or even use our broadcast feature to send them to everyone you have had a conversation with in the past.

Provide market-specific news updates

Whilst your customer is engaged in a chat with your bot is the perfect time to let them know other information that may be of interest to them. For example, if you provide online ticket sales for gigs, you might want to throw in chat messages like “Did you see that the Foo Fighters might be touring next year? Our team will certainly be trying to get tickets if they do”.

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Provide a virtual welcome mat to your business

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 21:27:04 +0000

Provide a virtual welcome mat to your business

Chatbots are the perfect way to welcome new visitors to your website, by providing a friendly greeting on their arrival, guiding them through the site and helping them find the information that they need.

When designing a chatbot, it’s tempting to dive straight into the details of what the customer might want, or what you want to tell them, but you wouldn’t do this in a normal human conversation. What’s much more important is to provide a welcoming intro - ask your customer how they are and let them know how they can use your chatbot.

Provide a concise welcoming statement

Use the first opportunity that a customer interacts with your chatbot to welcome them. Say “hello” and remind them who you are and why you’re embracing chatbots within your business. It may be the first time they’ve interacted with a bot before and so guide them through what it does.

Let them know what they can do

Your workflows can listen for specific keywords throughout a bot conversation and so it may be useful to let your customer know up-front what some of these are. For example, you might remind them that they can type certain keywords, such as ‘help’, ‘contact’ or ‘pricing’ to get to specific pieces of information.

Tell them how to get help

Sometimes, we all get stuck. It doesn’t matter how intuitive your chatbot is, at some point, someone will get lost. Therefore, when you welcome someone in, make sure they know how to get to help. This may be a ‘help’ keyword with the bot, a link to a page on your site or - even better - a method for them to switch from chatbot mode to live chat.

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Answer simple questions

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 21:18:00 +0000

Answer simple questions

By looking for exact phrases or keywords in a conversation, your chatbot can provide answers to common questions that you might receive. That way, your visitors don't have to search through web content.

Chatbots should be a friendly interface to your business, where your customer can provide you with information, get information and ask specific questions. Sometimes the question will be so simple that you may want the bot to give an answer immediately, or others may be more involved and require a link to a page on your website or help blog.

Provide a quick answer

Sometime your chatbot may get a really simple question that deserves a suitably quick response. For example, you may be a retailer and a customer asks “what time are you open to tonight?”. In this instance you could, of course, present the customer with a link to your opening hours webpage, but it’s much more convenient for them if you could just provide the response. Additionally, you can provide the opening hour in a much more colloquial way, for example “Hi, we’re open until 8pm tonight and it would be great to see you”.

Link to a full help response

Sometimes a quick response just isn’t enough, especially when it comes to help and advice. If you’re a software vendor then you may get asked something along the lines of “how can uninstall my product?”. In this case, it makes much more sense to provide a link to a webpage, YouTube video or blog post that explain how they do this. There’s certainly no point in duplicating information.

Offer to hand over to live chat

One of the key features of Flow XO for Chat is the ability to hand-off a chatbot conversation to a member of your sales or support team. If a question comes in that is more involved, or your bot can’t provide an answer, then handing the customer to a human can provide a seamless experience.

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Gather information

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 21:06:32 +0000

Gather information

Flow XO for Chat is our feature-rich chatbot platform that allows anyone to create code-free online chatbots (bots) quickly and easily.

We’ve all come across website forms that scroll off the page, with a seemingly never-ending barrage of questions that require an answer from you. Sometimes these are on a single page, or worse can extend over several pages. The problem with these forms is that they are presenting every single question at once. If this was a human-to-human conversation, you’d ask one question and then decide if you needed to ask the next. Chatbots give you the ability to do this.

Only ask relevant questions

If you create a workflow to ask your customers for information, then you can skip questions based on a previous response. For example, if your chatbot is for booking railway tickets and you know that your customer has requested 4 tickets (a full table) then it doesn’t make sense to then ask if they want a window or an aisle seat - as it’s assumed that at least 2 in the party will have a window and 2 an aisle.

Provide multiple-choice answers

Rather than having customers type every response, you can easily ask questions that have clickable, multiple-choice answers. For example, if your company offers multiple services, allow your customer to select the one that's relevant to their enquiry - the perfect scenario for a quick click!

Let them come back later

One of the biggest differences between a webpage and a chatbot is that the conversation history is kept alive with the chatbot. This means that a customer could begin to send you information, get distracted and come back the next day to pick-up where they left off. They could equally start the conversation with the chatbot on their desktop and then complete the conversation on their mobile later in the day.

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Accept payments via your chatbot

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 21:00:26 +0000

Accept payments via your chatbot

Request a payment

Flow XO for Chat is capable of taking payments part way through a conversation - for example, if it identifies a particular product or service that your customer wants to purchase, It can simply request a payment, specifying the currency and amount to be paid, and a link is automatically created that will take your customer to a secure payment portal to complete the transaction.

Receive a payment

Once a payment has been processed, an integrated action is triggered and your workflow can continue - sending a confirmation email or introductory welcome pack, or releasing a software code - whatever you need it to do.

Fully PCI-compliant

Payments are processed using the Stripe payment engine, so you don't have to handle any credit card information. When it's time to request or receive a payment, Stripe simply processes the amount and then waits for positive confirmation that the transaction was successful. This ‘stand-off’ approach means you don’t have to worry about PCI compliance at all.

For more information on how payment works, visit our online help guide:

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Live Chat

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 20:51:41 +0000

Hand over conversations to a human on live chat

Chatbots are excellent for initial interaction with your customers - capturing data, providing basic information and answering questions. But sometimes, we need to talk to a human - that’s why Flow XO for Chat allows any chatbot to hand over the complete conversation to a human agent.

From the customer's perspective, the handover is seamless, as the entire history of the conversation can be seen by the agent and they continue to type in the same messaging window as before. The only different is that a real person is now continuing the dialogue and answering their questions.

Once the human operator has covered everything required, they can simply hand the conversation back to the bot - perhaps to conclude the chat, rate the agent or gather some final automated information.

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Pre-filter leads

nathanstults — Mon, 04 May 2020 20:48:53 +0000

Pre-filter leads

If your website has a standard web form or live chat option, you’ll know the amount of human effort required when a lead comes into your business can be extensive. With a Flow XO chatbot, you can let your bot clarify and pre-filter customer data while they are on your site, meaning the quality of leads coming in will be much higher. Plus, your bot is available to engage with customers 24 hours per day.

Answer basic enquiries

Before completing an online lead form, your customer might have additional questions that they want answering - for example, “how long will it take for my application to be processed?” or “what forms of ID will I need to provide?”. These questions can be answered instantly by your chatbot.

Check that you can actually help

Rather than asking your customer to fill in a long form, only to then have one your agents call back the next day and qualify-out the lead if you can't assist, your chatbot can be set up to ask specific questions based on the answers the lead provides. Maybe, for example, your terms mean that customers can only use your services if they have not already used a similar, competing product in the last 3 years - your bot could be very specific in making sure this was checked.

Make sure you get all the information you need

We’ve all experienced the frustration of hitting ‘submit’ on an online form only to be told that “required information is missing”. Rather than a frustrating error message, a chatbot can ask a polite, friendly question, that makes your customer feel like their effort hasn’t been wasted.

Which of these do you think has the best result?

Web form: “Error, information missing. Check and try again.”

Chatbot: “Thanks for the information Emily. I've just checked and it looks like I forgot to ask you for your date of birth - sorry, it's been a long day! If you could confirm this then we have everything we need.”

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