Here is the list of all the steps available in the Bot Editor to send messages in various formats to your customers on the AlcmeonChat channel.

AI Bot ✨

This step enables an Artificial Intelligence API (either Natural Language Processing (NLP) or generative AI) to respond to the client's last message.

For more details, see our dedicated article: Create your AI Bot scenario

AI satisfaction ✨

This step is designed to be used after an AI has provided a response, allowing you to collect customer feedback on the AI's performance.

For more details, see our dedicated article: Create your AI Bot scenario 

Get Started

This step is triggered when a customer clicks the button that opens the chat window. It can be linked to a welcome message and a menu of options to guide the conversation forward.

Additionally, this step is where you define the "persistent menu" for the AlcmeonChat channel, which becomes accessible by clicking the menu button to the right of the message entry area.

Message with menu

This step sends a text message to the customer along with a series of "quick replies." These are interactive buttons the customer can click. Once a button is clicked, it disappears, and the button's label becomes the message sent by the customer.

In the Alcmeon bot editor, you can connect each button to another step, allowing the scenario to continue when the customer makes a selection.

The text message sent with this step can include emojis, an image, a video, an audio file, or another attachment.

Message only

This step sends a text message to the customer, similar to the "Message with Menu" step described above, but without any buttons.

It's crucial that this step is connected to another step in your scenario. If it isn't, the bot will abruptly stop at this point for the client.
 

Carousel

This feature allows you to send a set of up to 10 slides, which can scroll horizontally. Each slide can contain an image, then a title (maximum 80 characters), an optional subtitle (maximum 80 characters), and up to 3 buttons.

The Carousel step enables you to send a dynamic set of up to 10 horizontally scrolling slides. Each slide in the carousel can contain an image, a title (maximum 80 characters), an optional subtitle (maximum 80 characters) and up to 3 buttons.

Each button can either be connected to another step in your scenario, allowing the bot experience to continue, or open a URL that you define.

Unlike the "quick replies" described in the "Message with menu" step, clicking a carousel button does not make it disappear. Customers can scroll back through their conversation history and click the same button again, or any other carousel button.

Request Email/SMS notification

SMS notification no longer available until further notice

This step allows you to ask for the customer's email address and/or phone number during the scenario. This information is then used to notify them when an advisor sends a response in the conversation.

Note: This notification will not be sent if the client still has the AlcmeonChat interface open in their active browser tab, as it's assumed they are still actively viewing the conversation.

Several parameters are available at this stage. In particular, in the "SMS/Email Content" field, you must insert the variable(s) corresponding to the information you want the customer to receive in the notification content by SMS or email.

Here is the list of available variables:

• {{last_user_message}}
• {{answer}}
• {{landing_page_url}}

Classic Example of Notification Content:

Hello, an advisor has replied to you. Here's his reply: 

{{answer}}

Click on this link to continue the discussion: {{landing_page_url}}

Retrieving and Using an External Variable

Example Use Case: You're using AlcmeonChat on pages where your customers are logged in and you want to retrieve some of their personal data to pass it to inMessage and make it visible to your agents and/or use this data to guide the conditional logic of your bot scenario.

Customer information from your logged-in users can be passed to inMessage via attributes. These attributes are a list of key/value pairs (e.g., {"user_firstname": "Jean", "user_lastname": "Dupont"}).

To learn more: https://developers.alcmeon.com/docs/inmessage-authentication

 These values can be referenced as variables within your bot's scenario. In our example, you would use attributs.user_firstname and attributs.user_lastname.

The search for information involves two stages:

1. Creating an action in Alcmeon: Store each attribute into a new variable.
2. Creating a Custom Field: Store each variable from the previous step into a custom field that you have previously configured in Alcmeon.

1. Action in Alcmeon

Variable attributes cannot be used directly (e.g. to populate a custom field).

So in a scenario we need to create a first "Action in Alcmeon" step. This step will assign the attributes values to new variables.

In our example (we create the variables user_firstname and user_lastname):

• user_firstname = attributes.user_firstname
• username = attributes.username

These two newly created variables can then be used throughout your bot scenario.

2. Custom field

To utilize this retrieved information (for example, to display the customer's first and last names directly in the inMessage Inbox ), you need to define Custom Fields. These Custom Fields will then be populated by the variables previously created in the preceding “Action in Alcmeon” step.

In our example we need to create two custom fields that could be named:

• Name
• First name

Then add a “Custom Fields” step in the scenario:

• Set the type to variable
• Use the name of the variable defined in the "Action in Alcmeon" step (here: user_firstname)
• Specify the Custom Field to fill in (here: Name)

This setup ensures the data captured from your external system is displayed and usable within Alcmeon.