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Catch-All: Improve Flow Bot Responsiveness

A major challenge in chatbots is how to handle unexpected user input. For example, the bot asks “What is your name” and the user responds “I want to reschedule my appointment”. Or, as shown on the figure, the bot asks “Would you like to make an appointment? Yes/No” and the user responds “Do you have appointments on weekends?”

For more details on the problem, see our relevant blog post and the overview of our anti-drop-out technology.

Catch-All FAQ bot

SmartBot360 addresses this problem by allowing to set an FAQ bot as a “catch-all” for a Flow bot. This means that if none of the links of the Flow bot can be followed (because their conditions are not satisfied), the execution will be passed to the FAQ bot. If the FAQ bot has a relevant question (e.g., “Do you work on weekends?”) then the bot will display the answer to the question, and then continue with the execution of the Flow bot.

To set a catch-all FAQ bot, you need to first create and deploy the FAQ bot, and then go to the Flow bot, and click on the Settings icon.

After you select an FAQ bot, you can also set a threshold to specify the match sensitivity.

Chit-Chat Bot

In addition to setting an FAQ bot as catch-all, you can add one more layer of response generation by activating a chit-chat bot, which will respond to the user message if neither the flow diagram nor the catch-all FAQ bot have a match. As the name implies, a chit-chat bot generally tries to keep the user from dropping out without providing any significant information to the user. For example, the user may say “I am tired” and the chit-chat bot may respond “Do you believe it is normal to be tired?”.

To enable the chit-chat bot, scroll down in the Flow bot settings page as shown below:

You can program the logic of the chit-chat bot, which is used across all bots of your account, by going to SETTINGS→Other, and editing the script, which is written in Rivescript.