Flow Designs: Use existing data to create context for your chatbot

A good chatbot must be aware of the context of a conversation to deliver a good user experience.
Context means being aware of what’s going on around the conversation. Many chatbots today fail to deliver valuable conversations because they lack context.

A chatbot should offer its users the right information at the right time. Or, even contact them proactively by initiating a conversation at the right time.

This guide explains how to use existing data to create context for your bot so that best-in-class experience.

You can use different types of existing data to create context:

1. Page information
2. User Input
3. Profile information
4. Channel information

Existing data

You can use existing data to create context from several sources. We've list four common sources:

1. Page information

Is your user engaging on a specific page? Use that data to create context. Create context, but it might be wrong so don't forget to check it. Welcome to our features page. What would you like to know about our features?

2. User input

The input of the user can be extracted for several workflows. You might want to create a ticket in your CRM, send an email with the extracted data, request the status of an order or simply use the extracted data in your chatbot to personalize the experience.

Read more about extracting data in our article about Capturing and Extracting Data

3. Profile Information
   When using messaging channels like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you receive information about the user. Why not let your bot leverage this information to create a better chat experience?

{{user.name}}               //- name of the user  
{{user.profile.firstName}}  //- first name of the user  
{{user.profile.lastName}}   //- Last name of the user  
{{user.profile.fullName}}   //- first and last name combined  
{{user.profile.picture}}    //- profile picture  
{{user.profile.locale}}     //- user language  
{{user.profile.gender}}     //- user gender

Things starting to get fun when you use the available profile picture in combination with machine learning to detect age, gender, hair color to follow up with different flows.

4. Channel related
   Some channels are considered "richer" than others, meaning that they allow more types of messages.

The Web Widget and Facebook Messenger are considered as very rich while WhatsApp is a bit more limited. You can check which channel is using to deliver the richest reply possible on that channel. Read more at our article Channel-specific flows.