Overview

CommBox new Flow Builder presents a gateway to crafting powerful chatbots effortlessly. Our intuitive and user-friendly platform incorporates advanced AI technology and innovative user experience that enables both tech-savvy and non-technical users to create impactful bots.

In this beginner’s guide, we start with the basics, offering step-by-step instructions that make bot creation accessible to all without the need for coding. We describe the canvas, the different panes, and the functionalities as we build a real bot that can help your organization divert incoming traffic to different departments.

Once you are comfortable with your creation, you can connect your bot to the appropriate channel at the Automation section of the Channel Settings of that channel.

Bot builders, automation managers, and developers can use our Flow Builder to create an extensive automotive system that can integrate API calls, add AI knowledge base items, identify intents, and, coming very soon, enable our Autonomous Agent to handle all interactions. Learn more about additional automation in the Advanced Capabilities guide.

Prerequisites

Incorporated CommBox Features
CommBox has many powerful capabilities that the Bot can incorporate. For this guide, we utilized the following capabilities:

Business Hours
Tags

If you are not familiar with these features, read the above-linked guides for some general information. You’ll need to set up these modules to enable our demo bot to function.

Set Up a Chat Channel
To preview the bot interaction, we use a Chat channel. If you don’t use chat for communication, set one up by navigating to Settings > Chat and clicking the + Chat Channel button at the top. Name the channel and activate the needed features that you want the bot to perform. Learn more about our chat communication channels in the user guide.

Planning Phase

Our platform is a great planning tool for the actual bot, laying out the steps in a logical order and then filling in the “details.” Learn about the available tools at your disposal and best practices that can help you plan and create an amazing bot in our Planning Your Bot guide.

Our bot will:

• Let the customers select a category of service
• Tag the customers
• Divert the conversations appropriately.

Getting Started

We start with setting up a new building environment and explaining its components.

To create a new Flow:

1. 1. At the main menu sidebar, click the new Automation Hub icon to open the Flow Builder.
      

2. At the Flows tab, click the Create Flow button.
   

3. At the new dialog box, enter the name of the new flow and click Create.
   

The Flow Builder Canvas

The bot’s conversation with the customer comprises different dialog Steps, where the bot gives the customer choices in the form of buttons or it reacts to the free text responses typed by the customer. Other Steps act behind the scenes to create different functionalities, such as jumping to a different step or activating an API. All the steps together make up the Flow.

Building the Flow involves adding Steps to existing ones and modifying each additional Step using the Properties Panel at the side, which appears once you click on a specific step.

The steps

By default, Steps appear as choice buttons for the customers when the previous step has more than one “child”.
The content of the button is the title of the step, independently of its functionality. When selected, the step’s message will appear, and its action will be taken.

Step deactivation – Flow will ignore that step and any branch past it.
Alternative title – Flow will show those titles and not the step’s headings. See the example below where the customers do not see “Option 1” but rather “Details please,” etc.
Add comments – Add comments for yourself. Comments will not be shown to customers. Note the icon at step “Option 1”.
Title editing – Visible once you hover over the title. Edit it at any time.
Step Visibility – Enables the step’s title to appear as a sole button before the flow continues.

A new Step is created by hovering next to the desired step you want to build on, clicking the + sign, and selecting the type of Step from the pop-up menu.

Types of Steps:

Say – Gives information to the customer, including the available options to choose from.

Ask – Requests input from the customer.

API – Makes an API call to an external service to retrieve or enter data.

Forward to Agent – Transfers the conversation to an agent in an Open status.

Create Item – The Bot creates a secondary conversation (Text/SMS or email only) for the customer.

End – The flow ends, and the conversation’s status changes to Resolved or Irrelevant.

Jump – This step takes the flow to another step in the current flow or to another flow.

Back – This step sends the flow X steps earlier.

Link – This step supplies the customer with a URL, phone number, or email address. Usually, it sends
a link to another channel to continue the conversation in a different channel type.

Unknown – The flow will be diverted to this step when the bot receives unexpected information, such as a customer typing free text instead of selecting a button or entering unrelated information. If more than one Unknown step is used, the flow will be diverted to the closest one.

Error – When API calls return an error or no response, the flow leads to this step. This step must be placed in a higher hierarchy than the relevant API step.

Note: by hovering over any step and right clicking the mouse, you can see available actions regarding the step.

The Properties Panel

The top part of the Properties Panel includes the Step’s properties.
The lower part contains the steps’ settings and functionalities.

Top Bar

Search

The new Flow builder has an extensive search capability that enable users to filter results by the step’s type, the specific content area (step name, button text, etc.), by the flow’s property, or as combinations of the above. The relevant steps are then highlighted to show all results.

Flow Settings

This menu includes default actions in the Flow that deal with the lack of response by the customer and navigation, different fields used in the data collection, and the AI settings (coming soon!). When building more elaborate bots, the Flow Settings can save time and effort during the creation process.

We did not use these settings in this guide. Click here to learn more about them.

Test - Preview

Test the Flow actions by selecting a chat channel that can ran the bot you are designing.

Test – Debug

The debugger enables admins to see the historical context of any conversation by entering the conversation ID. Click here to learn more about this topic.

Building the Bot

Let’s begin!

1. The first new step when building a flow is a Say step.
   At the step’s properties, name it “Welcome” and enter a welcoming message.

2. Hover next to the “Welcome” step and click the + sign. Use it to create three (3) different Say steps. Note that after the 2nd one, the new steps will move below the “Welcome” step to indicate them as “children”.
   Name them “Sales”, “Tech support”, and “Customer service”.

3. Availability check: Create two more Say steps for the “New customers” step, calling one “During business hours” and the other “Off business hours”.
   

4. At the step’s Properties Panel, select the Entry Conditions section, click +Add Condition, and then select Availability Condition from the dropdown menu.

Select the appropriate Channel and subchannel (Sub-stream) for the relevant department (not necessarily the channel names you see in the examples below).
If you don’t have dedicated subchannel for each department, use the same general channel of all three.

For the “During business hours” step, the Channel State should be Active.
For the “Off business hours” step, the Channel State should be Inactive.
Click Save after setting each condition.

Based on the statuses used at your organization, you may want to add more conditions.
For the “Off business hours” step, click again on the +Add Condition button and add the “Off hours” channel status.

Note: The And/Or selection makes a difference when more than one condition exists. “Or” will proceed to the step if either Inactive or Off hours channel status is used.
“And” will require both statuses to be active simultaneously (impossible in this case) in order to go to the next step.

5. Copy the above step for the other two departments so that after the customers select the desired department, the bot will notify them if the service in not currently available.

Instead of creating each step separately, right click on the step you want to duplicate and click on the Copy single step option.

Navigate to the step you want to add to, right click on it, and select the Paste option.

Alternative Option:
If all three departments operate at the same business hours schedule, you can make one availability check on the general channel.

Note: You can drag the steps toward the “welcome” step.

6. Add the message for the Off hours step. For example: “We are closed now. Please call again tomorrow after 9 AM.”
   Alternatively, if you set the Business Hours module for automatic responses, you can just check the Add Availability Message box.
   

7. Added capability: Tags
   We want to tag the customers based on which division they selected.
   a. Go back to the “Sales” step (the first level of steps).
   b. Open the Set Tags section at the panel and click +Add Tag.
   c. Select the Customer tag option.
   d. Click on the desired tag(s) followed by OK.
   e. Repeat this process at the “Tech Support” and “Customer Support” steps as well.
   
   f. Assume we don’t see the tag we need. In such a case we can create a new tag by clicking the +Create new tag button.
   g. Enter the tag’s details including the team it belongs to, and click Create & Add Tag. The Tag will be listed at the team’s assets section. Learn more about Tags in clicking here.
   

After tagging the step you should see the tag icon in the step.

8. For the Tech support - Off business hours branch, add an End step.
   Select the Irrelevant option and add a goodbye message.
   

9. Add a new Forward to agent step to each of the other branches.
   In each of these steps, click the Change channel property and select the appropriate channel and subchannel that the call should be directed to.

For the steps that are during business hours, you can add an appropriate message (for example: “You are being transferred to the next available agent. Thank you for your patience”). For Off-times steps we already added a message in the previous step.

10. Click Save at the top bar to save what has been created so far.
    

11. Click the Test button at the top bar and select the Preview option followed by the testing chat channel that will run this preview.
    

12. Play the roles of both customer and agent to see the bot’s progression.

Once you finish running the Flow, click on the chat menu and select Logout to reset the conversation. Click the “X” button of the iFrame to close the chat.

WOW! your very first bot!

Read the Advanced Capabilities guide to bring your bot to the next level!