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Set up a chatbot

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Set up a chatbot to offer useful links and replies to frequently asked questions while your team is busy or unavailable. Learn how the Paldesk chatbot works and how you can easily set it up in your administration panel!

Where can I find the chatbot for my channel?

As you’ve probably noticed, Paldesk offers a number of different features and customization options, and we’ve done our best to make them easily accessible. There are 3 different ways you can access your chatbot:

Quick Setup

Click on the little magenta starpink starat the bottom of the screen. This will send you to the Quick Setup page, with shortcuts to your widgets, agents, email settings, Facebook integration etc. Select “Chatbot” from the menu, and you will be redirected to your chat channel settings.

Chat channel administration

Go to Administration > Channels > Chat, select the channel you’d like to edit from the drop-down menu, and go to the Chatbot tab to access and edit your chatbot.

Website widget administration

Go to Administration > Embeddable elements > Website widget. Select a widget from the drop-down menu and proceed to the Features tab. Next, click on the “Set up Chatbot” button to edit your chatbot.

For example:

Video 1.  How you can access your chatbot in Paldesk

What does the Paldesk chatbot look like?

We support a menu or button-based chatbot, i.e. the basic type of chatbot where you can define different questions and offer potential answers your customers can choose from.

Here’s what our chatbot’s basic layout looks like in the app:

Chatbot layout in Paldesk

Image 1. Basic chatbot layout in Paldesk

You can build your own chatbot from scratch, add and edit messages etc., but we’ve already included several templates to make it easier for you to build your own chatbot. To apply one of those templates, simply choose one from the drop-down menu in your chatbot administration area and save changes. Here’s what the layout of our Education template looks like: 

Chatbot education template

Image 2. Education chatbot template

Once you’ve configured and enabled your chatbot, it will appear every time a new chat is opened, and run until the sequence is complete or the chat is assigned to an agent. Here’s what your chatbot could look like from the agent’s perspective, depending on how you set it up: 

Video 2. Education chatbot from the customer’s perspective 

How can I set it up?

There are a few main rules to consider when setting up your Paldesk chatbot. Let go through them one by one:

  • You should always have a start and an end node.
  • Make sure all your nodes are linked to each other in a start-end type of way (as seen above). You will not be able to loop your chatbot back to start.
  • You need only one entry point per node. For example, a text node with five options needs only one entry point, not five.
  • In contrast, you need one exit point per port. Specifically, if you have a text node with five different options, you will need five exit points.
  • You won’t be able remove or customize the Timeout port.
  • The chatbot will automatically launch within 5 seconds, if enabled in the app, regardless of working hours or agent status.
  • Agents can interrupt the chatbot if they assign the conversation before the chatbot sequence is complete.
  • If you don’t want the Timeout port to be displayed in the chat window, make sure it’s not connected to the following text node in your chatbot layout.
  • If you want to connect a Delay node, the entry point should be linked to the Timeout port and the exit point should be connected directly to the entry port of the next text node (see example below):
delay node in chatbot

Image 3. Delay node setup

Other customization options

While our chatbot can help you share useful links and answers to FAQs, there are a few things we don’t support at the moment:

  1. You won’t be able to customize the chatbot’s color scheme.
  2. You can include links, but not images, gifs, or videos.
  3. There is no way to organize the order in which the offered options are displayed in the chat window.
  4. Our chatbot doesn’t capture emails or memorize data, and you will not be able to integrate it with a booking system.

And that’s how you can set up your Paldesk chatbot! If you come across any issues, reach out to us via live chat at paldesk.com or email us at support@paldesk.com. We’ll be more than happy to help you set things up!

Set up a chatbot was last modified: April 15th, 2021 by Milica Vujasin
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