Conversational Form issues and requests

After giving the conversational form a go i must say you have done a great job, i really love it.
Some kinks we need to iron out and some requests and general observations:

Issues:

  • Options glitch sometimes and instead of giving the actual options i’ve written it gives all options with the name “My option”.
  • Doesn’t go back to answer the original inquiry after form. It just says thanks even though i asked it to go back to answer the original inquiry. So for instance, right now, it kind of answers some questions but for others it just gives a brief semi-answer and goes into the form. “Before we go into that…” So it ignores to actually respond to the initial inquiry. One of my questions is do you want an expert to contact you? - And perhaps the bot can help them with their inquiry and they don’t need to be contacted - but the way it’s set up, it’s like they need to wait for an expert to contact them instead of having the bot solve it. Which is good for sales questions but bad for support.
  • Sometimes instead of the answer the user gives, in the google sheet it just shows “name” or “email” instead of the answers to these questions they provided. (Not sure if this is an actual problem or the system just created new rows when i updated the form - have to keep an eye on this to make sure).
  • If you remove one of the options in the settings you remove the whole options question, not just that specific option.

Requests and general observations:

  • Must have: Currently there is no way of declining replying to a form question. The bot will keep on insisting they answer, even if there would be no way for the user to give a reply. This is also not good since if the user does not want to provide their phonenumber but would be ok to give their email, we lose a lead if the phonenumber question is asked before since it get stuck on wanting the user to provide the number.
    Solutions and requests:
  1. If the user want’s to take the conversation in another direction or get a quick reply to a question, the bot should let them. It should answer the users questions and then go back to the form in an intuitive way.
  2. If the user declines to give an answer to a question, the bot shoud not be pushy, and say something like that’s totally fine, put that question on the back burner and move on to the next, capturing as much of the information as possible. Then it can circle back to the questions the user did not want to provide answers for in a subtle but pursuasive way and leave it if they decline again or becomes irritated.
  • Activate form within a specific time, on a specific quick reply or with a button. For instance i might have buttons (perhaps even with different, multiple forms) the user can click for example “Contact sales”, “leave review” or whatever else it may be.
  • Conditional forms: For instance I First ask for a name, then have a question “Would you like to be contacted by an expert?” - It would be great if that question - If the answer is yes, the rest of the form is triggered - if no - the bot just says something like, “Ok [name], is there anything else i can do for you?”
  • No way of reordering the questions in settings

General observations:

  • You need to clear or create a new google sheet if you change the questions or the questions will end up under the wrong column title.
  • I noticed that the bot sometimes answers the question of the user in a pretty intuitive way in between form questions, which is great. But with other questions it doesn’t, but i think this will be solved by other notes in this.

Thanks a lot for great work!

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Thanks, for the insight, we are working on it.

Options glitch sometimes and instead of giving the actual options i’ve written it gives all options with the name “My option”.
Yes i have already noticed this, we will fix this asap

Doesn’t go back to answer the original inquiry after form…*
We are thinkining how to best implement the trigger for conversational form, we will offer more than one option.

  • Sometimes instead of the answer the user gives, in the google sheet it just shows “name” or “email” instead
    Yes this is the header generating in google sheets from the questions…

  • If you remove one of the options in the settings you remove the whole options question, not just that specific option.
    ok noted!

If the user want’s to take the conversation in another direction or get a quick reply to a question, the bot should let them. It should answer the users questions and then go back to the form in an intuitive way.

The user should already be able to access the information from the knowledge hub. If they fail to provide an answer, the agent will ask again. We are considering how to create an exit intent for the form; we are open to suggestions.

If the user declines to give an answer to a question, the bot shoud not be pushy,
We will look into this!

We are planning to add conditional logic to the form.

Yes, you can reorder the questions. It’s a drag-and-drop form builder; just try it.

  • I noticed that the bot sometimes answers the question of the user in a pretty intuitive way in between form questions, which is great. But with other questions it doesn’t, but i think this will be solved by other notes in this.

Can you provide an example of when the Agent does not answer questions in a non-intuitive way?

Thanks Simone.

Except for some minor bugfixes i think all we need is different options of initiating the form and possibility of declining to answer a question with the bot skipping to the next question and gather as much intel as the user allows. I love the direction Answerly is going, so happy to be here.

An easy way (from my unconscious incompetence view) to do before diving into more intuitive and possibly complex way of solving the issue as i have seen is to be able to have two buttons when you open the chatwidget. (Can post a screenshot)

The company in the screenshot has two buttons

  1. “I have a question” which just lets you interact with the bot normally.
  2. “I want to book a demo”. Which will initiate a conversational form.

This is not ideal for all usecases and is probably a little worse at capturing leads subtly, but it’s a good option to have.

The ideal way i see so far is probably conditional logic when one of the questions leads to the form being quit early.
Like this:
Q1: Name
Q2: Would you like to be contacted by an expert? (Conditional logic)
If Yes: Continue with Q3 and rest of form. (=if true)
If no: End form / Continue with alternate form (=if false)
Q3: Phonenumber
Q4: Email

Can you provide an example of when the Agent does not answer questions in a non-intuitive way? For instance, on one bot i have, if i have the form off; i ask a support question (i got auto length) and the bot reply the correct response and even adds interactive video.
If i have the form on: The bot replies “Oh, sorry to hear that, but before we get into that, let me know you’re name?” and goes through the form of which one is “do you want an expert to contact you?” and after the form is done, it thanks the user and wonders if there is anything else.

In this case the user hasn’t received the in depth reply on how to possibly solve this without support, and now instead believes that the answer to the users question is to be contacted by an expert. For support questions, i don’t want them to feel like they can easily just get support by being contacted, but for sales i definately do want them to choose that.

Not sure if i’m making sense or not, let me know and i’ll try to clarify further.

Scrennshot of the example from another company
2 buttons:

  1. I have a question
  2. I’d like to book a demo.

Hello Simone,

more or less, when will the conditional logic be ready? This is crucial for me. I thought this is what we were getting with the forms update. There has to be a way to ask follow up questions based on the previous answer, otherwise, the conversation flow can go sideways real fast or confuse the visitor. Please advise, thanks

Hi Buzz, we are still developing the conversational form. We are aware of the conditional logic path the users can take and we are working on that.

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Thank you for the fast response. I know you cant give specific dates, but do you think this may be released within the next 30 Days? I won’t hold you to it of course, but to be completely transparent, without conditional logic, Answerly wont work for my use case. Im trying to build very structured conversation flows and conditional logic is a must for me. I need to make a decision if I am going to stay with this platform or go in a different direction. Regardless, thank you for your support and everything youre doing.

Hey @Buzz_Reach_Media

We’re currently working on a much more advanced form builder that will utilize conditional logic & much more advanced stuff! It should come during this February!

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Thank you. Related question. Is there a way to provide choices to questions similar to the starter questions? Or this that basically part of conditional logic as well?

Sorry but I don’t understand what you mean by starter questions.

So for example: Are you looking for a 3 Bedroom or 2 Bedroom? Then have those choices listed below the question | Question 2: Are you looking to buy or rent? And then have those choices below the question

Can we do that ?

The reason I’m asking is because every once in a while a visitor may not know how to answer a question and so giving them easy choices to select vs them having to think about how to answer. Some people just need a little guidance when it comes to answering. elderly people for example

Hi Buzz, I’m sorry but right now you can’t do that. You will have to wait until we further develop the conversational form and enable conditional logic. Fatos said this feature is aimed to be released in February.

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Ok. Thank you for clarifying and making things clear. I look forward to the update. Thanks again

We need a skip option for each question. The reason being, if I setup a bot that will collect data for a service and the user doesn’t want to give his email address but want to give the phone… he cannot skip the queston for email collection :frowning:

Please implement that asap.

Thanks!
image

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Any ETA on an update to conversational form that makes the form skippable, questions skippable or the likes?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re not 100% sure your customer will answer all the questions - it’s practically useless right? I can’t use a form which the customer might not want to answer a question on since the bot will endlessly loop it.

Or am I missing something?

Can you give me some example use cases for the conversational form as is?

BTW i just realised that it would be great if their first message was captured as well since that is usually their inital query

Hi, we are working on it, but we don’t have an exact ETA. The next release will address these problems.

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