HubSpot Ideas

stinhambo

Switch to bot when no agents available or outside office hours

I'm playing with the qualification bot that comes with Marketing Starter and there are a couple of things missing that I think should be offered before it's useful -

 

Switching between Messages and Bot depending on business hours/away status or time delay.

If I'm available, I'd like to speak to people, if I'm not (outside hours, I'm set to away or I haven't answered in 30 seconds), I'd like a bot to take over. Otherwise I'd miss out on an interesting lead because I wasn't available.

 

Giving the option to speak to someone and not forcing them to answer questions.
What if they're browsing, curious or just want to just ask a question? I'd like to offer this option to site visitors. Otherwise people could bounce and I would lose them.

 

HubSpot-Updates
Status aktualisiert zu: Delivered
August 22, 2019 11:48 AM

Hey Everyone, we just rolled out something that should allow you to set specific office hours at the inbox level for your team, ensuring your chatbots won’t be forwarding live chats to agents who have gone home for the day:

  1. Display chatbots based on team availability (always on, only on during business hours, or based on the availability status of team members)
  2. Use if/then branches to route visitors based on team availability

Go here for more details on how to use these new capabilities

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/control-your-chatbot-availability-with-new-custom-settings

Status aktualisiert zu: In Beta
August 21, 2019 03:45 PM

Status aktualisiert zu: In Planning
February 27, 2019 06:27 AM

31 Kommentare
Oscar_Panczenko
Teilnehmer/-in

Hi. This is an ABSOLUTE MUST HAVE.

 

I was expecting the bot to work this way, and even moved from Drift chat to Hubspot chat because of that functionality.

 

But I was mistaken, it is not possible to do it as it it now. Still something very easy to implement. Just need to add it as an option for:

 

- Out of office hours.

- Absent / No agents available.

 

That simple. 😃

Any ETA for this to be implemented?

Cheers!

Oscar

josie1
Mitglied

Hello,

 

for our business we also need the option to schedule Active chat and bot feature.

Status aktualisiert zu: In Beta
mfreiert
HubSpot-Produktteam
 
Status aktualisiert zu: Delivered
jtremblay
HubSpot-Produktteam

Hey Everyone, we just rolled out something that should allow you to set specific office hours at the inbox level for your team, ensuring your chatbots won’t be forwarding live chats to agents who have gone home for the day:

  1. Display chatbots based on team availability (always on, only on during business hours, or based on the availability status of team members)
  2. Use if/then branches to route visitors based on team availability

Go here for more details on how to use these new capabilities

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/control-your-chatbot-availability-with-new-custom-settings

fabianj
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

Hi, doesn't look like "delivered" to me. The most important feature is missing:

 

  • "Show Bot only OUTSIDE of business hours"

Usually you would like to sent request to people instead of bots if available and if no one is available, the Bot can handle the request. 

CJfromRobling
Mitglied

I'm here to pile on this request. Even one of HubSpot's own support team members was confused by this KB article which implies the functionality we're all seeking: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/conversations/chatflow-availability-settings

and was surprised the functionality didn't exist.

 

As a small company, we are not available for 24/7 chat support. I would like the capability to set a chat bot to automatically be enabled outside of the office hours set in the live chat flow. The proposed solution given was to remember to turn the chat bot on every morning/evening. There's got to be a better way.

 

@hubspot please add this feature. Also, rewrite the KB article referenced above as it's very misleading. It even confused your own rep!

mcurschellas
Mitglied

Adding on to this. Like @CJfromRobling said we are looking for a functionality to automatically switch from one chatflow (during business hours) to the other (the Bot outside of business hours). This thread is very confusing since it makes the issue look resolved ("Switch to bot when no agents available or outside office hours") when it isn't. Both the article the previous poster pointed out and this article: https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/control-your-chatbot-availability-with-new-custom-settings don't deliver the solution.


@jtremblay, please add this feature.

Seth_Israel
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

I was also very confused and thought this was delivered but the functionality we desperately need is to show bots outside of business hours and let our team take over during business hours. This all should be managed from one inbox.

Someone suggested doing this from multiple inboxes is possible, but didn't lay out the how-to, can anyone elaborate on making this work that way?

Seth_Israel
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

I see the confusion now, I've been able to successfully do this but I had to make it so every conversation is first managed by the bot, first asking for name and then email. From there the bot can use the IF/AND branches to quickly determine if someone is available or not.

If they are available it immediately boots them to a team member after verifying name and email. If the whole team is unavailable then the bot continues and helps with setting up tickets for certain issues/concerns our customers normally have. ALTHOUGH... this is not ideal, we would much rather prefer a complete separation.

The other side of this is that if the team does not go unavailable then they will continue to get chats booted to them throughout the night and the bot won't run it's normal ticket assistance overnight. Because to get this to run the way they describe in the article below you have to use ALWAYS on not Business hours.

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/control-your-chatbot-availability-with-new-custom-settings
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/conversations/chatflow-availability-settings

I hope this helps someone else, seems like since we have paid we can do this but free users cannot use those IF/AND branches. Either way, definitely feel like this isn't delivered and the intentions of the requests were a simpler solution with a Chat flow being simply:

During HOOP - Start with Live Chat unfiltered directly to Reps!
Outside of HOOP - Bot Chat flow takes over to help, refer to email and set up tickets.

Seth_Israel
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

Working more on this with HubSpot support and our Engineering team.

We've theorized that instead of turning on/off chat flows we can just create two different boxes and manage them with HOOP. Not sure if anyone else has done this successfully but this would provide a non-human activated/deactivated process for Bots and Chat Avail for Humans.

kaburke
HubSpot Employee

There seems to be a lot of confusion on this thread so I want to clarify a few things.  This is a very helpful article to read.

 

It is not possible to have an offline bot and a live agent firing at different times regardless of whether you use another inbox feature.  The priority will always take precedence and only comes into play when you have set particularly targetting rules.  The team availability is not a rule you can target by. 

 

My recommendation would be to have a helpful bot always firing on your site.  During business hours it is capturing information prior to handing the conversation off to an agent and outside of business hours you can let the user know sooner than later while still being able to direct the person to helpful pages/resources.

 

Examples flow is as follows (obviously add more customization as required):Snag_826dc5.png

 

When the team is available:Snag_8551e2.png

 

 

When the team is unavailable:

 

Snag_85e94f.png

 

You will need to have the chat availability set to always and don't show a reply time in the inbox/team availability settings.

 

Important:

It is important that you have a process whereby the agent always has to set themselves to away for this to work correctly.  We also have a BETA here which means that the manager can double-check and control that everyone has logged out before the end of the day.  I hope this helps! (wrong link in my first post!)