It’s been a while but I wanted to provide some suggestion on product improvements and ideas.
You may have this in the works so please feel free to cross out. It would also be good if everyone in the community could contribute and add feedback suggestions.
Customize image for chat icon at bottom of page. It would be nice to instead of using a “bot” image (icon), it could be customized by using a real “person” photo.
Auto welcome message. Inject auto welcome message to initiate engagement with visitors to the site. It could be a couple of ways. Popup image to ask to see if they need help or a popup from the image from the bottom of the page.
Tags base on actions within the gambit based on user behavior. These tags can be used as events tags for google tag manager, google analytics, facebook or other platforms.
Integration with Google Analytics to show events. When considered one of the goals for a user to the website is chat engagement. If a chat engagement is activated then it can be defined as a goal completion. For running campaign in Adwords, FB, etc, goal conversion measurement is critical.
Design with Marketing Agency in mind.
One of the main if not the most important element for a marketing agency is to generate new leads or business. Thus, having the ability to create “client” login or being able to send “leads” data via email would be useful.
Zapier - Make a direct api to Zapier
Twilio / SMS integration
Time sequence and automation rules. This goes beyond the idea of immediate chatbot but gives you the framework of creating a marketing automation workflow. For example, if the chatbot could send reminders for meetings, followup messages via integration with Email systems or SMS… then TARS could be the centralized “brain” or “hub” for marketing automation. FYI direct Zapier integration would be needed.
Botchat engagement notification and live engagement. When someone interacts with the bots, it would be useful if the bot owner knows and a live person could interject into the conversation.
Integration with Linkedin, Whatsapp or other chat / messenger applications.
This post was wordy, hope this help you guys and the community as a whole. Please contribute and or provide feedback and provide your own suggestions.
@joe Can you explain this a bit more in detail. An example use-case for this will be very helpful to understand this feature request.
@joe I think this one is similar to the previous point. Where you want a way to know events while the user is engaged with the bot on GA or FB Dashboard, Specifically for certain goal based events.
I think this will be next level of product evolution.
This is already possible with the API-Config Integration feature. You do have to put in the API endpoints, Keys and data params for Twilio manually. I think this can eventually be further simplified with something like API presets, or maybe something better. We will be working on this in the future.
I think the best to do marketing automation workflow with TARS would be to integrate it with a seperate apps, which already does these things well. Something like Intercom or Hubsoft. Such integrations with external apps is something we will be releasing this year.
A Live notif for any user interacting with the Bot. Hmm… this will go way too much in the direction of live chat thingy. The whole point of having a full automated chatbot is so that you don’t have to worry about the conversation that is happening on your behalf. You have carefully made the whole conversation flow and now you can focus on doing something else.
We already have an FB messenger integration. Although it does need a more comprehensive update. WhatsApp still haven’t released a Chatbot platform. Does anyone uses Linkedin based chatbots?
Hope this answers some of your queries. Again love the suggestions you made. Keep them coming. I cannot promise to make all of them, but this will help in identifying the most valuable feature and will definitely make it faster.
I think preset API integrations, or something that simplifies the integration of that follows the “no programming required” theme of TARS would be huge for me personally. I agree that interjecting with a live agent defeats the purpose, and after designing a bot system that has handle 50,000 users in less than six months, there are ways to send users to representatives that can begin a convo through other means and on a more realistic time schedule with realistic resources. If too many people need a live rep at once, the system is self-defeating.
I wholeheartedly agree that features and a dashboard more geared to marketing would be great. But at the same time, this works against the casual users that come to TARS. These folks are really important too, so it makes the balance act difficult (at least I assume this to be the case).
Maybe a theme for marketers/professional bot builders specifically that comes with a specific plan option?
Thanks for the detail response and details to the help doc. I will follow-up with use case example and provide more suggestion soon, should be in a couple of days.
Remove TARs branding at the top. If you guys want to get higher value Enterprise clients (eg. agencies) this is a must. It is pretty much standard in the SaaS industry that branding be removed from paid plans - so you’re against the trend on this.
Faster loading - as you guys are aware, load time is a huge conversion factor. Sometimes the first message can take some time to load. Not as important as (1) but worth considering - especially as you add improvements.