The Flow XO Messaging Service

The Messaging service from Flow XO enables bot users to have a direct line of communication with your business: The power of a bot backed up by human intelligence

Flow XO is is a complete platform for building, hosting and managing chatbots for messaging apps, such as Messenger, Slack and Telegram. It presents some excellent native and third-party service integrations which mean that you can take your bot to the next level — beyond the fun chatbot that makes other people laugh, to the functional bot that makes (or saves) your business money.

One such Flow XO service integration is the Messaging Service which allows customers to contact human representatives of your business in real time, directly through the bot / messenger interface.

This can be achieved without any code — and your bot can be distributed across multiple messaging platforms meaning you can communicate with customers in all the apps that they’re already using.

So giving a chatbot human intelligence by backing up its conversation with a real human is very much a stable and business-ready technology thanks to Flow XO’s Messaging Service.

Typically, you’ll have the bot handling some simple admin tasks — for instance collecting data through a conversational form, and then pass off to a human when a more complex requirement arises. It’s likely you’re already using a support or ticketing app to manage customer queries, so the great news about Flow XO’s Messaging Service is that it’s support-service agnostic.

All messages from the bot you launch can be routed to either a standard email service, such as Gmail, or captured in your support software. You just need to give an email address to route the message to.

There is a pre-generated template Flow that makes the best of this service, so you get it up and running in under 5 minutes. You can install it to get going with this service right away — All you have have to do is click this link, hit the ‘Free Install’ button and sign in. Assuming you have a bot launched on Flow XO, it will start working right away. If you need to get a bot in place, you can follow this guide to get a Messenger bot online.

Here’s what the Flow looks like:

So looking at this Flow in detail:

1. We trigger the Flow on a set of keywords. So a customer visits the bot and says ‘Let me talk to a human’, ‘speak to customer service’ — or even ‘This bot is useless!’. This is the trigger to get a human response.
2. Assuming this is the first request (not a reply to a previous message from a human, we handle that with the filter — you can see the callout on the second task) we send a message to the user to keep the conversation with the bot engaging: “Sorry you don’t like talking to me 😭I’ll get hold of a human right away….”
3. In the third task, we ‘Ask a Question’ — We can collect the customers response for use later in the Flow. “Please tell me what you’d like to ask?” Alternatively, Flow XO can give a set of choices as buttons to help guide the user.
4. Then, the dynamite feature itself — We use the Messaging service in task 4 to route the answer to the customer’s question to a live, human agent — at any email address, in Gmail, Freshdesk, Salesforce Desk.com, Help Scout — the human agent can then respond directly into the channel that the customer is presently in. So, seeded directly back into the Facebook Messenger chat, for instance. Even better, when the human agent does send a message back — the customer then gets a ‘Reply’ shortcut to maintain the thread of conversation with the human.
5. Finally, in task 5, we ‘Send a Message’ back to the customer — again, to ensure that this interaction is engaging — “📮 Thanks, got it! We’ll usually get back to you within a few working hours.” Of course if this was a sales inquiry — we’d have an agent waiting for the lead to be routed to them, where they could respond immediately to close the deal.

This flow is completely customisable — The tasks, the words and phrases — everything. So hack away — or build your own bespoke Flow from the start incorporating the Messaging service.

Again, the link for that template, to get your own Flow XO human-augmented messenger bot in place, is here.