Managing Chat Workflows

Feature Overview

Chat Workflows use information about your web visitors to make decisions on when to show a chat experience, how to customize the chat, and who from your team should receive the chat.

Workflows can be created using information like:

• UTM variables
• IP Lookup
• Visitor Location
• Time of Day / Day of week
• Page facts like URL, Page Name
• Information provided by the visitor
• and More

The three types of chat customizations that Workflows can be used to control include:

Presentation Rules: These allow you to decide whether or not to include the chat button on your website.

These types of rules can be used to:

• Exclude chat from certain pages on your website
• Manage the schedule of the chat presentation over the weekend or on holidays  
• Due to challenges in lead quality, chats that come from a specific referrer should not be routed to your team
• Delay the chat window pop-up for a period of time to let the users read a portion of a page before offering a conversation.

Proactive Message Rules: These allow you to dictate the text that is displayed in proactive button messages.

Routing Rules: These allow you to determine the routing rules of a chat request. Some scenarios where you might use routing rules include:

• If the chat originates from a specific country, route the chat to the correct team.
• If the chat occurs in the middle of the night, route the chat to an overflow bot.
• If a UTM variable is identified, route the chat to the team that handles chats with that indicator.

Workflows can also dictate when email transcripts should be sent out, and to whom it should be sent (ex: to a single email address, either for an individual or a team alias).

Setting up a Workflow

Email Transcript Options

To create a new Workflow, selecting the “+ Create New Workflow” link on the Workflow Screen:

• Once your workflow has been created, you’ll have the option to make several customizations. Starting with naming your workflow, your next step is to configure your Email Transcript Options.

• Emails can be sent to any system or email address.
• The emails can be in Plain Text or HTML.
• You are able to set a timezone for your emails.
• You can also determine under what conditions a chat transcript should be sent 

Presentation Rules 

Next, you can configure when the chat button should appear on your website using Presentation rules. If you do not set a Presentation rule, the chat button will always be present on your website. To add a new presentation rule:

• Select the “+ Add New Rule link”

• You can determine if you want the condition to be “always,” or select + Add Condition to present the button under specific circumstances.
• You can then use a single or a series of logic statements to determine when to show your chat button. These logic statements can be based on several different data points including:
  • Page title and URL
  • UTM, page referral
  • Time passed
  • Page scrolled
  • Page focus
  • User device
  • Time range (If the chat occurs within available hours, or off hours)
  • Visitor info (Name, email, etc.)
  • and Data Ask / Data Element
• You can also use a combination of statements to determine when the button will, or will not be shown.

• You also have the option to Auto-Expand the Frame, which will auto-open the chat engagement window.

Proactive Message Rules

You can also use Workflows to define a pre-chat pop-up message on your website to prompt visitors to chat. To add a Proactive Message: 

• Select the + Add New Rule link:

• Determine if you want the condition to be “always,” or select + Add Condition to present the button under specific circumstances.

• You can then use a single or a series of logic statements to determine what you would like your proactive message to say.  

• Because it is possible to have a large series of possible proactive messages, you can decide to stop the proactive message workflow on the first matched rule using the “Only fire on the first matched rule” toggle. This can be helpful if you want to show an initial proactive message, but change that message as the page loads or more information becomes available. 
  
  
• Writing the message details:

Example page: https://www.terminus.com/utm=Jason

{system.variables.utm != null ? system.variables.utm: terminus.name != null ? terminus.name : "Visitor"} 

In this case it:

1. Checks to see if the UTM “Jason” exists.
2. If it does, it prints the variable value (in this case “Jason”) and stops processing.
3. If it does not, it checks to see if the terminus.name exists (based on IP lookup).
4. If it does, it prints the variable value from the lookup and stops processing
5. If neither, it prints “Visitor.”
   
   

Routing Rules 

Finally, workflows can be used to determine Routing rules, which will affect which plays, Routing Groups, or fallback procedures you would like your chats to follow.

All Terminus Chat setups will include a required fallback route, or an “always” rule, to ensure that every chat ends up somewhere productive. You will see the “Fallback” rule pre-defined in your instance. All you need to do is provide the appropriate message or backup rule.

To add a Routing Rule:

• Select the + Add New Rule link.

• Then determine if you have an “always” condition, or if you’ll use a series of logic statements to determine which “route” you would like the chat to take. In the example below, we used information from Data Asks to route chats from any of our “ABM Priority” accounts, that also came through our “Enterprise” Campaign, to our sales team.   

• You can select to delay the routing by a number of seconds, and provide a specific message to the user if they are going to be connected directly with a sales representative.
• Finally, you can decide to create a Fallback response in the event the chat routing did not result in a connection. This setting will override anything you defined in the “Links & Website Chat” section of your Chat Admin settings.