About step types in the virtual service agent flow builder

Example

Let’s say you want to provide different information to employees about working from their nearest office, but the information changes depending on which country they’re in. You could add an offer choices step, and have the virtual service agent ask, “So that I can give you the right information, can you tell me which region you’re in?” and offer each available country as a choice: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and United States.

When the customer selects their country, they begin moving along the conversation flow branch for that country, where the virtual service agent provides the most accurate information for them.

Example

In the example above for offer choices, let’s say your customer chooses Australia as their country, and the information you need to send them is accessible via your help center documentation (and is too complex to put in a message).

In the conversation flow, after the Australia choice, you could add a send message step that says, “Got it! Check out this link for information about working from our Australian offices: www.example.com.”

Example

In the examples above, let’s say your customer chooses Australia as their region, and the virtual service agent sends them a link to some relevant information about visiting their local office. After this, the virtual service agent may ask (using another offer choices step): “Do you want to book a desk in one of our Australian offices?” with Yes and No choices.

If the customer selects No, the conversation could continue, or they could go straight to the resolve or escalate standard flow and finish the conversation. Read more about standard flows.

If the customer selects Yes, you may want to insert an ask for information step: “So that I can help you, can you tell me which office you’d like to visit?”

When they respond with the name of the nearest office, this could be used in a send web request step later in the conversation flow branch, allowing them to instantly book a desk at their local office.

Example

Continuing with the ask for information example, let’s say the customer responded to the question “So that I can help you, can you tell me which office you’d like to visit?” with “Sydney”.

You could set up a send web request step later in the branch that sends a web request to a URL created for booking a desk at your company’s offices around the world, and reference it using the syntax provided on the ask for information step for the “Sydney” response:

{
"office": "{{customfield_10081.id}}",
"reporter": "{{reporter.emailAddress}}"
}

If the response from the web request matched one of your success conditions (status ~ 2??) , you could then have the virtual service agent tell the customer (using the send message step type) that their desk has been booked.

Read more about using the send web request step.

Example

Continuing with the examples above, let’s say you need to make sure that all issues created for customers based in Australia use a different request type to the other countries (which just use the virtual service agent default request type).

To do this, you could add a change request type and fields step right after the Australia choice. When adding this step, you choose which request type you want to use for all issues raised after someone selects Australia (and if desired, specify one or more field values).