WhatsApp Custom Bots

You can create custom bot paths for customers who want to contact you over WhatsApp. To do this, simply navigate to Settings > Custom Chatbots to create custom bot paths based on the chatbot feature.

Learn more about the Custom Chatbots feature here.

On the listing section of the Custom Chatbots page, you can view all of the bot paths you've created. You can edit the bot paths you've already built or build a new bot from this page.

General Information

To create a new path, select the Create New Bot button and fill in the fields shown in the image below. Give your bot a name, select the product for which you want to build a bot, select WhatsApp as your channel, and select your default language.

Now, let's create a new Desk360 bot exclusively for the WhatsApp channel to show you how to use this function. We named our bot Desk360, created a product and a channel, and set English as our default language.

Desk360 is a customer service software that lets you provide professional customer care in 40 different languages. You can manually add your texts from the Translations tab to use your own bot path translations in the languages you provide support in. If you receive a WhatsApp message in a language or fill out the translation field in a language you don't provide support in, your bot will switch to the default language you chose earlier.

If you want to use this path, make sure the status toggle in the upper right corner is turned on.

Select the Continue button to start creating your path.

Creating Paths

By adding reply buttons to your WhatsApp channel, you can get answers from your customers. You can use the Follow-up Actions to assign your customers to a representative. Customers can utilize these reply buttons on the WhatsApp channel as buttons on the WhatsApp screen if you add three or fewer; if you add more than three, it will display as a list.

Using the Desk360 example, let’s create the following welcome path for your customers. This path will be displayed to customers as shown below on their WhatsApp screen.

You will notice the new layout we've created for this page when you select the Features button. Now let's have a look at the Features button path we just built. The path we created for the Features button is called Features, and here you can build six new buttons specifically for this path by selecting the Reply Buttons. We create custom paths for these response buttons, as seen below, in order to allow our customers to select one for these buttons.

You can use the Add button in the lower right corner of the text field to send multiple messages to your consumers in addition to the buttons. You can save your messages by selecting the green tick, and you can delete them by selecting the trash icon when you've finished typing them in the text field. You can input the translations of your text in the languages you want to provide support in the Translations field. You can add translations to the reply buttons by pressing the world icon, save all the reply buttons you've added and the paths you've matched them with by selecting the green tick, and delete them by using the trash icon.

Now, let's go back to our example. Your customers will see these options on WhatsApp as a list, as seen in the image below, because we have added more than three reply buttons to this path. Let's say the customer chooses the Integrations option from the list in our example.

Now, for customers that select the Integrations button, let’s edit the path with the same name as before. Let's say we want to assign customers who want to learn more about Integrations to online agents. Follow-up Actions, rather than reply buttons, will be the type of action that will work best for us in this scenario. You can assign your customers to a group or representative via follow-up actions, or you can stop the bot and redirect them to the survey page. We'll use the Assign To option from the Follow-up Actions menu to complete this path by assigning it to the customer agent. Now, customers that select the Integrations button will be assigned to a group or representative.

The conversation is assigned to a different agent with the same authorization if there is no available agent in the given group or if the designated agent is not available.

If you wish to stop the bot instead of assigning the customers who want more information on Integrations to a representative at this point, you can use the text we typed into the message box to inform the customers who select the Integrations button from the list in detail. After entering our content in the message field, we redirect customers to the survey by selecting Close & Direct to Survey from the Follow-up Actions menu, as shown in the image below.

Important Notes

Depending on the communication channel selected, the Custom Chatbots function may have different rules and limitations. These are the ones that apply to WhatsApp bots:

• Each path can have up to ten buttons.

• Each answer button is limited to 20 characters.

• Each text field in the path can contain up to 1024 characters.