Dec 21, 20184:12 PM - last edited on Aug 22, 20192:46 PM by jtremblay
HubSpot Alumni
Chatflow Bot availability and office hours
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:
Display chatbots based on team availability (always on, only on during business hours, or based on the availability status of team members)
Use if/then branches to route visitors based on team availability
Go here for more details on how to use these new capabilities
Something that could be great is the ability to activate a Chat and a Chatbot at the same time, and the Chatbot displays only when nobody is available on the Chat. That way, even if an agent has to be away, the bot takes over.
I feel like this is another example of built-in obsolescence. The ability to auto-toggle chatflows, regardless of the type, based on time should be a basic feature. We currently do this with other third-party systems that are pennies on the dollar in comparison to Hubspot.
Additionally, with the expense of Hubspot being so high, things like this and the inability to delete form submissions, or even auto-assign leads when you only have the marketing hub is overally fustrating.
Hubspot is a great product, but I feel like it cuts its users off at the knees in terms of some basic functions and productizing features to force additional package purchases.
One of the 4 main steps of the chatflows is "When" the chat bot should appear... I was hoping to see start & stop options allowing me to cherry pick the weekdays and times. But instead, it was all about which URLs the chat bot should appear on (so wouldn't that be more appropriately called "Where"?)
So one suggestion for the product team is to tie the scheduling to the "When" section. The benefit here is that we don't have to manually remember to toggle off the chat bot with live agent at 5pm and then toggle on the "after hours" chat bot every week day.
Create a contact property, let's say a single-line text field named "chat_time"
Create a workflow that only executes during your office hours. The workflow has one action: set the contact property "chat_time" to the value "office hours"
Early on in your bot chatflow, use the action "enroll in workflow" to enroll the contact in your workflow.
Somewhat later in the chatflow, you can use an "if/then" condition on a bot action. You can use the condition "chat_time" is equal to "office hours" as the condition. If YES --> go to agent handover. OTHERWISE --> go to further qualifying bot actions
(one could then think of some refinements for dealing with repeat interactions, like resetting that chat_time property appropriately via workflow, for example, but this would be the basic solution.)
i agree with everyone above, ideally we want live chat during the day, and then automatically based on our hours of operations the bot would kick in, I don't think this would be too hard to do, would it?
As I am working through setting up chatbots/live chats for our organization I came across this exact issue. My goal was to have a live chat active during business hours and after business hours or if the live chat was set to "away" have the bot appear so we can still be collecting information when someone is offline. Having the ability to do this hands-free with less manual steps would be ideal. Hopefully, this feature will be available sooner than later. Until then, this post provided some helpful ways to get around this for now.
In the meantime, can I suggest installing the chat code with Google Tag Manager? This would enable users to set a Custom Tag Firing Schedule, adding and removing chat from the website on a schedule.
.png "HubSpot Alumni"){kind=icon}
