Smart Email Notification Concept

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The thought came to me that if you could choose which email address you want an auto-redirect gambit to send the report to, you could customize the bots to email leads to different sales people. Or in the case of CAMI (a large online question submission system for government), there wouldn’t need to be a bot handoff, rather it would collect the information all on the one bot, and when the user reached the end, it would send the report to the service representative or desk that could answer their questions (over 20 different desks).

Maybe if activated, you simply display a field in the gambit where you type a custom email. Leaving it blank defaults to the main email set. This would eliminate about 20 bots from the state system and be a seamless experience for users.

For me, it seems like the use case is plentiful and dynamic for bigger businesses and organizations. This came from the idea on the community where I asked if the TARS team could disable an auto-redirect from triggering an email report all together (which has less use case than a smart notification system, but still handy for certain applications).

Having the ability to send email reports to specific emails based on the path of conversation would be great for for sales/conversion bots for example. Say there are 5 employees that cover different aspects of the business that could be notified directly of a lead pertaining to them. I think this could be a major feature that really sells the service as a conversion tool for big companies and government.

I’d love to hear what other people think on this subject. I think if it was a feature that could be toggled like API integration and data iterations it would fit right in. How do you think this could benefit your bots?

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Levi, this is something I have been thinking about recently and very glad you mentioned. This would be a perfect solution for exactly what you laid out, being able to funnel leads, prospects and customers to specific email address depending the choices they’ve made in the gambits. I can already see this benefiting some planned bots we have on the drawing board, for example a company that has a sales dept and a service department - whichever path they choose, the email would be forwarded to the proper person in each dept. That’s just one example, but can be applied to many others - different divisions, departments, sales people, regions, countries, etc.

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Thanks @Levi for this feature request.
This is something few of our other customers are also asking for. Right now they are getting email notifications for every single conversations, which is too many, and the most important ones are getting lost in those emails.

One such customer wants that on a specific gambit with fixed button options, say 4 options, if the user has selected the 2nd option, then he gets the email notif on another email address, otherwise get the email on the default email address. So this is a rather relatively complex condition for email routing.

Considering this, We are starting to conceptualize the best way to approach this problem and I want to share this idea with you for your input.

So we have introduced the concepts of Goals in the Bot conversation, which is currently being used in the Analyze section to calculate the Goal Conversion Rate. You can read more about it here: http://help.hellotars.com/configure/goal-settings

Currently the Goal Settings in Configure section, allow for setting exactly 1 Goal, and that too just checks if any of the given gambits have gotten any user response. If yes, then that goal is acheived.

Now we want to allow users to set Multiple Goals for the Bot, with different set of conditions, much like how you set conditions in Conditional Jump Config section. Where you can even compare values of user response, API response etc…

Now in the email notif section, you can choose to send Goal based notifs, e.g… Once you have set say 3 Goals for you Bot, you can set the email notification behaviour for each of these goals. That means you can define the email to send the notif on, when Goal 2 is achieved. OR don’t send email at all if none of the Goal is acheived, OR send email to this default email etc…

I think this approach will allow versatility of email routing, specially for Big and complex Bots. But I am anxious if this feature will be too complex to understand. I am curious to know your thoughts.

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Initial thought is it will range from simple to very complex depending on the overall size of the bot and function; however, I think it is a smart approach overall that could have greater functionality as time goes on. I’ve created a 50 question keyword search FAQ bot, so this really doesn’t intimidate me :rofl:

Goal focused features are pretty much always a good thing. They keep us focused on our task too. If we want a goal to be reached and a specific action to occur, we must focus on our goal flow. Ultimately, this is what we really want to do anyway, so including this feature into that workflow makes a lot of sense.

If this is the case, I would like to have what the report sends customizable (maybe the goals are the only sections of data it sends, so you set your goals to only capture the user submissions you want). Say the user treks around the bot for a bit before deciding to go down the goal path that is set up. I may not want the sales rep or customer service rep to wade through all of their interactions just to get the pertinent information.

Overall, I’m on board with the goal-driven concept. It makes sense, and I can not really think of any drawbacks to that approach. I will ruminate on it some more and see if I think of anything else. Thanks!

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Also on a separate note, very excited to see what you come up with the multiple goal set up that can reference data. I skimmed past that in my last response, but I could imagine massive uses for such a system.

I think there will always be some learning curves associated with these advanced features. Your average user may not want to learn or not even have need for it, but the TARS documentation and tutorials are essentially impeccable, and I think if the knowledge is available to successfully learn implementation and replicate it then you shouldn’t have too much anxiety about this feature. If you still do, then it would all come down to how it is represented on the dashboard. Usability/UI will become an important foundational element to a complex feature such as this. The more intuitive and simple the interaction with the feature.

Maybe having a simple and complex version that can be toggled between the two would be worth the extra work (Almost like the calculator app on a phone that can switch from basic to scientific to reveal numerous other functions and features (or how we toggle all the advanced features in bots right now, but it effects the goal settings area under Configure instead). This could offer the simple approach new users need while offering more complex features should advanced users need them.

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