How to create an effective first message?
In this article you will learn to set up a customized first greeting for the bot to interact with your customers fluently, thus generating a friendly conversational environment.
Estimated reading time: 06 minutes
What is the first message about?
The goal of the first message is to welcome the user, explain the bot´s main functionalities and notify the user about how their queries will be addressed. To this aim, a first message intent is already predefined and cannot be removed, but you can modify it to reply with a customized message according to your specified trigger, thus redefining the first message that will direct to that intent.
The first message will allow you to introduce the bot, greet the user and set your expectations. The greeting always ends by showing an options menu with the help topics that the user can select and, if there are live chat agents assigned, the bot will give the option to chat with an agent.
First message setup
An intent allows setting the answers that the bot will give to the user according to their questions, phrases, words, or conditions, defined on our platform as triggers. You can check the article How to create an intent? para más información. You may also find the following articles helpful: How to create customized responses? , What are the best practices for your bot? .
On the platform, go to menu>intents>predefined intents>first message
The first message intent has now 2 sections: the response delivered when the bot starts the conversation and the response delivered when the user starts the conversation, as you can see in the following image:
If the bot starts the conversation, the conversation appears in the first section, and it will be the first message seen on the chat.
In the second section, the message is set up when the user starts the conversation. In such a case, the bot will start the first greeting and then will attempt to respond to the user´s message with the best intent (this is the reason why actions are not allowed since they could interfere with the best intent). In the following screen, the bot sends the greeting message and, when the user includes an action, the bot triggers the response “I am not sure”.
In case the user only greets (by activating the “Greeting” intent”) then the bot will directly respond with the “Greeting” intent avoiding the “First Message” so as not to greet twice. In the following screen, you can see an example where the user greets and the response is triggered from the “Greeting” intent”:
In such cases (whether the user or the bot starts the conversation), the responses allow all the conversation components (text, images, videos, carousels, etc) but not actions.
What are the best practices for my bot´s first message?
Follow these tips for featuring your bot on the first message and achieve a better interaction with the user:
- General greeting according to the time of the conversation (good morning, good afternoon, good evening).
- Respond to the greeting using the user´s name.
- The bot should always lead to an interaction: view options menu, talk to an agent. The bot should always have an answer after the greeting.
- Conversation fluency: all dialogs ending with a bot phrase should offer options to continue the communication at the moment or with a defined timeout in minutes or seconds.
- The bot should introduce itself, make its identity known to generate a user-friendly environment.
- Define responses for the use of insults and inappropriate language with an intent that leads to the end of the conversation.
Note: These changes apply only to bots created as of 2021.
Written by: Botmaker Team
Last updated: 06/04/21
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