Unknown flow
dialog unknown
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dialog unknown
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The unknown flow is triggered whenever your virtual agent receives a message for which it cannot find a corresponding user intent (answer, flow or dialog trigger). In that case the message is literally "unknown" and therefore this flow is executed.
You can do anything you like in this flow, but out of the box it is normally configured to help escalating to a human operator.
Before escalating to a human this flow is configured with two prior actions that are relevant to describe:
A simple start is letting the user know that the bot is escalating the question. Instantly starting with identification might confuse the user. Always letting the user know what is going on or what is going to happen will keep him/her engaged.
Knowing the email address of the user is most important so we can re-engage this user whenever we need to. Furthermore we ask for the name so we can properly address the user when talking to him or her. We retrieve the user information using questions that cannot be skipped. The reason for doing this with questions instead of a form is because a form sometimes scares away the user, thinking it is still a bot he/she is talking to instead of a person.
We don't want to repeat ourselves so we configured this action to be skipped when we already have the email address of this user using the condition: when not email. The same action is used for the name.
Out of the box your virtual agent is configured with only two relevant topics (sales and service) and one "catch all" topic (general). When the topic was already established it will skip this question due to the condition when not sales, service.
When there is no operator available, we are closed, or when no operator responded, we will explain this fact to the user and manage their expectations:
When we were closed
When there was no operator
Give the user the option to wait, plan a meeting, leave a note or switch to an other chat platform
In the above picture we opened the Show buttons tab for a clearer view of the different choices the user can make. Planning a meeting gives the user the option to choose when he/she will want to be contacted. Changing to an other platform (Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger) will give the user and the operator more time to respond. Through Whatsapp or Messenger the user does not have to wait in front of the computer or laptop for an answer.
The action we use for this question is the action.
Now that we know why the user is contacting us and how we can address and re-engage this user, we want to find an operator to hand this conversation over to. Therefore we configured the action.
The flow will simply the virtual agent after explaining the next steps. This is to make sure the virtual agent will not continue talking or trying to help when clearly it wasn't able to help in the first place. Now it is up to the live agent (operator) to join and help.
