Welcome to Chatbox, the worlds leader in creating customer relations software! This guide is intended to help people get off the ground using Chatbox how it is intended to be used. This guide assumes you will already have access to the home console
- Integrating Twilio
- Making an Instant App
- Add New Interactions to Agent Pool
- Create a FAQ bot
- Further Readings
To be able to text into the channel, first we must bring in the Twilio integration.
If you already have a Twilio account, grab the sid and auth token from your
project dashboard. If you do not have an account, you will need to sign up and create a project.
Once you have your SID and Auth Token, click on the integrations button in the Chatbox console.
Click Twilio to find a page full of ways the Twilio integration will help your organization.
Click 'Integrate now' to move on to the next pane. Name your integration, and put the SID and Auth Token
in the corresponding text fields. Click save, and this will unlock the ability to add a number to your channel.
Near the top of the page there will be a slider denoting your integration as inactive. Toggle this slider to
Active in order to be able to use this integration.
Adding a channel will open up a way for your customers to interact with you. From the home screen of the console,
click on channels, then Add Channel, and finally Twilio-SMS. From your Twilio account, generate a new number.
Once you have this number simply put that number in the assigned phone number field in the New Twilio-SMS Channel page.
Keep the Name and ID of the channel as they appear; the id will be referenced later in the guide.
Make the channel active and that's it! Your customers will now be able to reach you, but in order for
you to respond you have two options:
Structured data is a vital part of any customer interaction. Chatbox has made collecting that data easy with
Instant Apps.
To create an Instant App, click on the Instant App button, and select Add Instant App. From this point you may
either use a template, import a json schema, or start from scratch. Whatever option you choose, to get the most out of
your Instant App, you will have to play around with all of the elements/features available.
There are many elements available for use in your Instant App. The drag and drop functionality of the Instant App Builder allows you to easily play around with the layout to get it just right. Here are some of the more commonly used layout elements.
As the name suggests, the image tag allows you to upload an image into the Instant App. Try dragging and dropping your image for a quick and easy upload! Images can also be styled to affect the margins or the border.
Single Line input fields are text input areas with a label that can be displayed above or inline with the text. Virtually any kind of styling you could do with css is available in the styling tab. The Validation tab allows you to make the data required, have a minimum/maximum number of characters, match a regular expression, or you can write your own custom javascript validation function.
Buttons, like all other elements can be styled in the style tab. The real use of buttons will be what event or action they trigger when clicked. See the Events and Actions section for more information on that.
The Label element is simply a field where text can be displayed using Markdown. This element can be styled in the same way most other elements can be.
This element allows to you display a bar chart, pie chart, line chart, or scatter chart. You also have the option to display static data from within the element or dynamically display data from a javascript snippet.
This is where your Instant App really comes to life! Here you can have action handlers for many possible triggers on many possible elements. As a basic action, make two panes in the Instant App, with just a button on the first pane. In the Events and Actions tab, click the button from the first pane. Choose a condition to set when the action will be triggered. For buttons, the available options are 'pane is valid', 'pane is invalid', or 'button is pressed regardless of validation'. There are more options when making actions for the other elements.
To make the button go to the next pane, simply select the 'Activate and Show Pane' action. Then just drag and drop the second pane and your button will show the second pane.
When selecting an Action, there are many available options. Most allow you to use the drag and drop functionality to fulfil the action. All require no knowledge of javascript, except JavaScript Snippet. This allows you to write your own javascript to include some extra logic in the other actions. Refer to the following documentation to aid in writing your own JavaScript Snippets: Snippet Documentation
If you are using Chatbox as a means for your Agents to interact with customers, you may just want every new interaction to go to an Agent Queue. To do this, click into Automations from the home console. Click 'Global New Interaction', then 'Add JavaScript Snippet'.
interaction.handoffToUser("email","your@email.com");This function will put the interaction into the agent queue for the agent with the email specified in the second parameter.
One of the things that makes Chatbox so useful is the ability to have a bot handle as many questions as possible
but if a customer would rather have a human respond, the bot can handoff the interaction to an Agent.
This portion of the guide requires you to have an FAQ bot already instantiated. If you do not have one, go to the
Create a FAQ bot section and then come back.
Having a bot hand off the interaction to an Agent is very simple! Create a new intent titled something like 'Agent'.
Within this intent, create Sample User Phrases that you would want a customer to ask for an Agent,
such as 'Get me a Human'. Enable Execute JavaScript, and invoke the interaction.handoffToUser method
to escalate the interaction to an Agent.
The FAQ bot functionality is powered by the Alterra NLP engine. In order to integrate a bot,
first sign up with Alterra and get the API key associated with your account.
Once you have your API key, click the Automations button on the Chatbox home console.
Next to the Events tab, click the bots tab. Click Add Bot, then FAQ Bot, and fill out the subsequent fields to
describe your bot. The API key from Alterra goes in the NLP Key field.
In the Training section of your bot, click on 'Add New Intent'. Name this intent 'Hello World'. In the Sample User Phrases section, add the phrase, 'hello'. Under the Fulfillment Actions, make the Reply, 'world' and save. Now when a customer texts, 'hello' in to your channel, your bot will automatically respond, 'world'.
Congratulations! You now have a channel for customers to interact with your company and a bot to
automatically respond, with the capabilities to hand off to a human agent or send a customer an Instant App!
Create more intents to make your bot more useful and informational for your customers.
To add even more functionality to your system, stand up a node server to receive Web Requests using the
chatbox.callExternalWebAPI method. More information on that here.