How to add a chatbot to my website?
In this article you will find all the resources needed to help you get started with the Bot plugin. We'll review how the Bot works, and how you can leverage it to create numerous flows suited to your most diverse and extensive usages.
The Bot plugin is a powerful no-code tool that combines logic with a blueprint interface to allow you to easily and swiftly deploy scenarios on your workspace. By dragging blocks and linking them together, you can create a series of events, conditions and actions which you can customize to automate flows that best fit your needs. The Bot is not only capable to automating pre-configured user-journey, it can also be used to help your team in their day to day duties thanks to many of its powerful features.
Common usages include:
Automating responses to common questions, with choice buttons to guide the user to more precise answers
Assigning conversations to different operators from your team, based on certain criteria (language, segments, and various conditions)
Creating automated flows to ask users for various information, or when your team is unavailable
And many more usages to make your life easier as well as enhance the quality and efficiency of your support
This guide will cover all the basics to launch your very first scenario and provide the necessary resources to achieve even the wildest and complex ones, so let's dive into it!
Still not sure whether the Bot would fit your use-cases? Don't hesitate reaching out and chatting with us!
The Bot plugin is exclusively available on the Crisp Unlimited plan. To find out more about the many features and tools available on the Unlimited plan, don't hesitate visiting this article
I. Installing the Bot plugin
II. Creating, Deleting, Importing, and Exporting scenarios
III. First Steps with the Bot
Learning More
→ Starting a Bot Scenario when a user sends a message
→ Starting a Bot Scenario without a user sending a message
→ Starting a Bot Scenario manually
Chatbot Guides
→ Out-of-Office Responder
→ Asking users for Informations
→ Department Routing
Tips & Tricks
→ Renaming a Scenario and adding a Description
→ Scenario Priority
→ Adding Blocks
→ Dragging Blocks in-between Existing ones
→ Connecting Blocks & Deleting Wires
→ Branch Priority
→ Group Selection
→ Copy & Paste
→ Live vs Draft
Extra Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
Quite easy! From your Crisp dashboard, simply head over to Plugins > Bot and click the install button. The Bot will be installed on your workspace, and you'll be able to start creating your scenarios. Note that the Bot is only available on the Unlimited plan.
Crisp allows you to easily create & delete scenarios, but also importing and exporting them.
In our Helpdesk articles dedicated to the Bot plugin, you will often find "templates" at the end of guides. You can download and import these in your own Bot to test them out, inspire yourself, or simply review them in greater details.
You can also easily export scenarios from your own Bot to save them locally, or to share them with us if you have any doubt during the configuration.
Here is is a quick illustration to help you understand how to Create, Delete, Import and Export a scenario from the Scenario Manager view.
The Bot scenario editor interface will give you all the tools you need to configure and achieve what you have in mind.
You can open the drawer on the left to drag and configure each of your blocks, in order to build your flow bit by bit. There are different tools and options available which you can leverage to build even faster and more efficient scenarios. We'll review these in our Tips & Tricks section!
When your scenario has taken shape, you can easily test it directly from the editor by saving the draft and clicking the "Test Scenario" button at the top-right corner. Once you're satisfied with the result, you can deploy it in order to enable the scenario on your website.
Let's see a quick example:
You're now ready to craft your own Bot scenarios! Feel free to check out our related guides and available templates below, we also have some extra tips to help you in your journey 🤖
There's always more we can do with the Bot plugin. Unlimited use-cases can be achieved by learning, building and experimenting with the available blocks and configuration.
To help you prepare and learn about the most common use-cases and setups, we've prepared some quickstart guides to help you get started on the right foot.
If you'd like to dive even deeper into the different Blocks and subtleties of this plugin, the Understand & Mastering the Bot plugin is also a great read to learn even more!
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario when users send a message
The most common way to start any scenario, by listening to incoming message and triggering it when a message is received.
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario programmatically, by the using the SDK
In some cases, you may want to start a Bot scenario automatically when a specific event occurs on your platform/website. The SDK can help you achieve this!
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario from any conversation, directly in your inbox
Very useful to have control a scenario you would like to trigger at crucial moments, such as sharing a meeting link!
We've prepared numerous guides to better help you understand the fundamental principles and to showcase examples of the most common usages of the Bot plugins.
You'll find guides and resources to help you build scenarios that fit your needs, and helpful tips to customize them as your needs evolve over time. Most of these guides include a template which you can import into your own Bot, so feel free to try them out!
A guide to help you create an Out-of-Office or Weekend Responder scenario.
Especially useful to provide continuity in your support when you're unavailable, orient users to helpful resources, or gather information to give you a head start when it's time to reach back.
A guide to build a scenario which automatically ask users for specifics informations.
Helpful to gather information prior to an agent joining the conversation, and to ask the user for data and information relevant to their request.
A guide to help you route conversations to the proper team/agents.
This can be used to improve both your team's efficiency, and enhance the quality and relevancy of the support you're able to provide, by ensuring the conversations reach the proper department.
There's multiple ways to achieve different things with our Bot interface. You'll find that most of your favorites commands have quick access shortcuts, such as block creation, edition, or even copy/pasting blocks!
In this section we'll take a look at some of them, you'll also find illustrated examples of these!
Not only can you rename a scenario from within the editor, it is also possible from the main the Scenario Manager menu.
You can also add a description to make your scenarios more obvious to your team, or leave them a note about how they are supposed to be used.
One important concept to keep in mind is that only one scenario can be triggered at the same time in a conversation. For instance, if your scenario "Ask users for informations" has the priority over your "Department Routing" scenario, and both start on the same event and conditions, only the former will be triggered.
You can mitigate this by specifying conditions and different events within each of your scenarios, so that they are each able to start when they meant to, but which scenario's conditions will be checked first?
Well, in that case Crisp allows you to adjust the priority of your scenarios, so that you can determine which one should run. In your Scenario Manager area, you'll notice a label with a number next to the name, this is the order of priority.
To change that priority, you can simply drag them around and rearrange their positioning.
There's a few different schools in order to add new blocks in your scenario. It all depends on your preference!
You can use the + icon after selecting the previous block, but you can also choose to open the drawer and directly drag the block where you'd like. Here is a quick example of both:
You can of course click the + icon below any block to prompt quick block selector menu, but you can also directly drag and connect a block directly.
To do so, simply open the drawer, and drag your block over any existing wire you'd like the block to occupy.
For the scenario to follow its flow, blocks must be connected to each other. When a Block is dragged into the editor, it will look to connect to the nearest block available automatically.
However, in cases where you'd like to delete the wire and connect a block to a different one, the Bot offers you as easy way to do so, by dragging the wire from a Block's anchor point to the other.
When building Scenarios, it will often happen that you need to split your flow into several branches.
For instance, you might want a scenario to offer a different experience if your user has an email set or not, or do specific actions based on the messages they sent.
When adding you have a block connected to several child elements, you will notice a number appearing on the wire connecting of these elements. These numbers represent the order in which the Bot will check which branch it can follow. It will first check if it can follow the branch with the 1 wire, then 2, etc. The Bot will check each branch based their priority, and follow the first one it detects a match for.
Selecting multiple blocks is also possible with the Bot plugin. To do so, simple maintain the shift and select the area of blocks you'd like to highlight.
This will enable you to easily reorganize them, but also perform a group deletion, or duplicating them! We'll learn more about the latter in our next tip.
You can copy and paste individual blocks in order to reuse them somewhere else in your scenario.
This can be done can select a block and using the "copy" in the quick menu, or directly by using the shortcut ctrl + c or cmd + c on Windows and Mac respectively. Once copied simply left click anywhere you'd like to paste them.
This is also possible for group selections of blocks, by using ctrl + c or cmd + c on the highlighted blocks.
You can swap in-between the "Draft" and "Live" view of your scenario in order to review the changes you've made before deploying it.
This can also help you work on improving your scenario without affecting the live version, thus not impacting your users until it is actually deployed. You can change in-between these two views directly from the Action menu on the top-right corner of the interface.
Note that you cannot edit the scenario while in "Live" view, you need to swap to "Draft" in order to make changes.
Learning more about the Bot
Perhaps you still have some interrogations about the Bot, and would like to know more about the specifics and details of each blocks. For instance, you might be wondering how Exit blocks work more exactly, or when you should use an Action or Condition block. Whether it's to satisfy curiosity or learn more about the technical aspects of the Bot, we have set up an article that reviews how the Bot, scenarios and blocks work in greater details.
Video guides
Our articles contain animations and videos to better illustrate and walk you through creating your scenarios, but you can also directly hop to our YouTube channel!
We have a dedicated playlist regrouping our video guides, if you'd like take a deeper dive into some concepts.
Bot included, but not only
As you already know by now, the Bot plugin is only one of the features available on the Unlimited plan. It's a powerful way to better enhance your support's reactivity and cover a limitless amount of usages, but Crisp has many more tools at your disposal.
Check out all the available features here to see how you can better take advantage of Crisp!
Still have some questions about the Bot that were not covered in this article or related guides? Perhaps you'll find the answer here!
Here is a collection of the most frequently asked questions, you'll also find some extra resources to help you better understand how this plugin works, and to prepare for the most obscure and extravagant use-cases.
Don't hesitate visiting this in-depth article to learn more about the Bot and master your craftsmanship of scenarios
If your question does not figure here, share it with us directly by chat, we'll be available!
You may have misconfigured certain blocks in your scenario. You can user the "rearrange and "center view" options to reorganize your scenario and give you a clear overview of it.
Make sure that all of your blocks are correctly set up and connected to each others.
When a block contains a misconfiguration, there will be an orange warning left of it. You can hover this warning with your cursor to display a tooltip giving you more information about the error related this block.
The Bot plugin uses a logic type-of-flow which does not incorporate AI, it is designed to be predictable, consistent, and to be a robust way to more efficiently handle your support inquiries.
However, we have several plugins powered by AI which can match what you are looking for.
Explore some of these on our marketplace, or refer to this dedicated article for more information.
Absolutely, this can be very helpful to offer more options to your users and start different scenarios depending on their choices and needs, but this is also a good way to organize your Bots in a more efficient and manageable way.
We've made a guide about this which dives deeper on the subject.
There can be various reasons, make sure to double-check that the configuration of your scenario is correct, and that it is indeed deployed and enabled.
Keep in mind that the Bot will not be triggered automatically in ongoing conversations, if an operator has sent a message in the past 20 minutes, it will not start to avoid interfering.
Don't hesitate checking out the dedicated articles depending on how you wish you scenario to be triggered:
Starting a Bot Scenario when a user sends a message
Starting a Bot Scenario without a user sending a message
Starting a Bot Scenario manually
The Scenario editor interface has an integrated menu to help you test your scenario directly, as covered earlier in this article. However, in some cases you may want to test it live if it contains advanced conditions, or if it is composed of several inter-connected individual scenarios.
A good way to test a scenario "live" without causing interference with your users, is to edit the terms detected by your initial "**User sent a message"** Event block, and to temporarily make it detect a term only known by you (like a password).
The Bot plugin is a powerful no-code tool that combines logic with a blueprint interface to allow you to easily and swiftly deploy scenarios on your workspace. By dragging blocks and linking them together, you can create a series of events, conditions and actions which you can customize to automate flows that best fit your needs. The Bot is not only capable to automating pre-configured user-journey, it can also be used to help your team in their day to day duties thanks to many of its powerful features.
Common usages include:
Automating responses to common questions, with choice buttons to guide the user to more precise answers
Assigning conversations to different operators from your team, based on certain criteria (language, segments, and various conditions)
Creating automated flows to ask users for various information, or when your team is unavailable
And many more usages to make your life easier as well as enhance the quality and efficiency of your support
This guide will cover all the basics to launch your very first scenario and provide the necessary resources to achieve even the wildest and complex ones, so let's dive into it!
Still not sure whether the Bot would fit your use-cases? Don't hesitate reaching out and chatting with us!
The Bot plugin is exclusively available on the Crisp Unlimited plan. To find out more about the many features and tools available on the Unlimited plan, don't hesitate visiting this article
Table of Content
I. Installing the Bot plugin
II. Creating, Deleting, Importing, and Exporting scenarios
III. First Steps with the Bot
Learning More
→ Starting a Bot Scenario when a user sends a message
→ Starting a Bot Scenario without a user sending a message
→ Starting a Bot Scenario manually
Chatbot Guides
→ Out-of-Office Responder
→ Asking users for Informations
→ Department Routing
Tips & Tricks
→ Renaming a Scenario and adding a Description
→ Scenario Priority
→ Adding Blocks
→ Dragging Blocks in-between Existing ones
→ Connecting Blocks & Deleting Wires
→ Branch Priority
→ Group Selection
→ Copy & Paste
→ Live vs Draft
Extra Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
I. Installing the Bot plugin
Quite easy! From your Crisp dashboard, simply head over to Plugins > Bot and click the install button. The Bot will be installed on your workspace, and you'll be able to start creating your scenarios. Note that the Bot is only available on the Unlimited plan.
II. Creating, Deleting, Importing & Exporting your Scenarios
Crisp allows you to easily create & delete scenarios, but also importing and exporting them.
In our Helpdesk articles dedicated to the Bot plugin, you will often find "templates" at the end of guides. You can download and import these in your own Bot to test them out, inspire yourself, or simply review them in greater details.
You can also easily export scenarios from your own Bot to save them locally, or to share them with us if you have any doubt during the configuration.
Here is is a quick illustration to help you understand how to Create, Delete, Import and Export a scenario from the Scenario Manager view.
III. First Steps with the Bot
The Bot scenario editor interface will give you all the tools you need to configure and achieve what you have in mind.
You can open the drawer on the left to drag and configure each of your blocks, in order to build your flow bit by bit. There are different tools and options available which you can leverage to build even faster and more efficient scenarios. We'll review these in our Tips & Tricks section!
When your scenario has taken shape, you can easily test it directly from the editor by saving the draft and clicking the "Test Scenario" button at the top-right corner. Once you're satisfied with the result, you can deploy it in order to enable the scenario on your website.
Let's see a quick example:
You're now ready to craft your own Bot scenarios! Feel free to check out our related guides and available templates below, we also have some extra tips to help you in your journey 🤖
Leaning More
There's always more we can do with the Bot plugin. Unlimited use-cases can be achieved by learning, building and experimenting with the available blocks and configuration.
To help you prepare and learn about the most common use-cases and setups, we've prepared some quickstart guides to help you get started on the right foot.
If you'd like to dive even deeper into the different Blocks and subtleties of this plugin, the Understand & Mastering the Bot plugin is also a great read to learn even more!
✹ Starting a Bot Scenario when a user sends a message
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario when users send a message
The most common way to start any scenario, by listening to incoming message and triggering it when a message is received.
✹ Starting a Bot Scenario without a user sending a message
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario programmatically, by the using the SDK
In some cases, you may want to start a Bot scenario automatically when a specific event occurs on your platform/website. The SDK can help you achieve this!
✹ Starting a Bot Scenario manually
A guide to help you trigger a Bot Scenario from any conversation, directly in your inbox
Very useful to have control a scenario you would like to trigger at crucial moments, such as sharing a meeting link!
Chatbot Guides
We've prepared numerous guides to better help you understand the fundamental principles and to showcase examples of the most common usages of the Bot plugins.
You'll find guides and resources to help you build scenarios that fit your needs, and helpful tips to customize them as your needs evolve over time. Most of these guides include a template which you can import into your own Bot, so feel free to try them out!
✹ Out-of-Office Responder
A guide to help you create an Out-of-Office or Weekend Responder scenario.
Especially useful to provide continuity in your support when you're unavailable, orient users to helpful resources, or gather information to give you a head start when it's time to reach back.
✹ Asking users for Informations
A guide to build a scenario which automatically ask users for specifics informations.
Helpful to gather information prior to an agent joining the conversation, and to ask the user for data and information relevant to their request.
✹ Department Routing
A guide to help you route conversations to the proper team/agents.
This can be used to improve both your team's efficiency, and enhance the quality and relevancy of the support you're able to provide, by ensuring the conversations reach the proper department.
Tips & Tricks
There's multiple ways to achieve different things with our Bot interface. You'll find that most of your favorites commands have quick access shortcuts, such as block creation, edition, or even copy/pasting blocks!
In this section we'll take a look at some of them, you'll also find illustrated examples of these!
✹ Renaming a Scenario and adding a Description
Not only can you rename a scenario from within the editor, it is also possible from the main the Scenario Manager menu.
You can also add a description to make your scenarios more obvious to your team, or leave them a note about how they are supposed to be used.
✹ Scenario Priority
One important concept to keep in mind is that only one scenario can be triggered at the same time in a conversation. For instance, if your scenario "Ask users for informations" has the priority over your "Department Routing" scenario, and both start on the same event and conditions, only the former will be triggered.
You can mitigate this by specifying conditions and different events within each of your scenarios, so that they are each able to start when they meant to, but which scenario's conditions will be checked first?
Well, in that case Crisp allows you to adjust the priority of your scenarios, so that you can determine which one should run. In your Scenario Manager area, you'll notice a label with a number next to the name, this is the order of priority.
To change that priority, you can simply drag them around and rearrange their positioning.
✹ Adding Blocks
There's a few different schools in order to add new blocks in your scenario. It all depends on your preference!
You can use the + icon after selecting the previous block, but you can also choose to open the drawer and directly drag the block where you'd like. Here is a quick example of both:
✹ Dragging Blocks in-between Existing ones
You can of course click the + icon below any block to prompt quick block selector menu, but you can also directly drag and connect a block directly.
To do so, simply open the drawer, and drag your block over any existing wire you'd like the block to occupy.
✹ Connecting Blocks & Deleting Wires
For the scenario to follow its flow, blocks must be connected to each other. When a Block is dragged into the editor, it will look to connect to the nearest block available automatically.
However, in cases where you'd like to delete the wire and connect a block to a different one, the Bot offers you as easy way to do so, by dragging the wire from a Block's anchor point to the other.
✹ Branch Priority
When building Scenarios, it will often happen that you need to split your flow into several branches.
For instance, you might want a scenario to offer a different experience if your user has an email set or not, or do specific actions based on the messages they sent.
When adding you have a block connected to several child elements, you will notice a number appearing on the wire connecting of these elements. These numbers represent the order in which the Bot will check which branch it can follow. It will first check if it can follow the branch with the 1 wire, then 2, etc. The Bot will check each branch based their priority, and follow the first one it detects a match for.
✹ Group Selection
Selecting multiple blocks is also possible with the Bot plugin. To do so, simple maintain the shift and select the area of blocks you'd like to highlight.
This will enable you to easily reorganize them, but also perform a group deletion, or duplicating them! We'll learn more about the latter in our next tip.
✹ Copy & Paste
You can copy and paste individual blocks in order to reuse them somewhere else in your scenario.
This can be done can select a block and using the "copy" in the quick menu, or directly by using the shortcut ctrl + c or cmd + c on Windows and Mac respectively. Once copied simply left click anywhere you'd like to paste them.
This is also possible for group selections of blocks, by using ctrl + c or cmd + c on the highlighted blocks.
✹ Live vs Draft
You can swap in-between the "Draft" and "Live" view of your scenario in order to review the changes you've made before deploying it.
This can also help you work on improving your scenario without affecting the live version, thus not impacting your users until it is actually deployed. You can change in-between these two views directly from the Action menu on the top-right corner of the interface.
Note that you cannot edit the scenario while in "Live" view, you need to swap to "Draft" in order to make changes.
Extra Resources
Learning more about the Bot
Perhaps you still have some interrogations about the Bot, and would like to know more about the specifics and details of each blocks. For instance, you might be wondering how Exit blocks work more exactly, or when you should use an Action or Condition block. Whether it's to satisfy curiosity or learn more about the technical aspects of the Bot, we have set up an article that reviews how the Bot, scenarios and blocks work in greater details.
Video guides
Our articles contain animations and videos to better illustrate and walk you through creating your scenarios, but you can also directly hop to our YouTube channel!
We have a dedicated playlist regrouping our video guides, if you'd like take a deeper dive into some concepts.
Bot included, but not only
As you already know by now, the Bot plugin is only one of the features available on the Unlimited plan. It's a powerful way to better enhance your support's reactivity and cover a limitless amount of usages, but Crisp has many more tools at your disposal.
Check out all the available features here to see how you can better take advantage of Crisp!
Frequently Asked Questions
Still have some questions about the Bot that were not covered in this article or related guides? Perhaps you'll find the answer here!
Here is a collection of the most frequently asked questions, you'll also find some extra resources to help you better understand how this plugin works, and to prepare for the most obscure and extravagant use-cases.
Don't hesitate visiting this in-depth article to learn more about the Bot and master your craftsmanship of scenarios
If your question does not figure here, share it with us directly by chat, we'll be available!
I'm unable to save changes, there's a red banner appearing, what can I do?
You may have misconfigured certain blocks in your scenario. You can user the "rearrange and "center view" options to reorganize your scenario and give you a clear overview of it.
Make sure that all of your blocks are correctly set up and connected to each others.
When a block contains a misconfiguration, there will be an orange warning left of it. You can hover this warning with your cursor to display a tooltip giving you more information about the error related this block.
I want my Bot to answer users with AI generated responses, is this possible?
The Bot plugin uses a logic type-of-flow which does not incorporate AI, it is designed to be predictable, consistent, and to be a robust way to more efficiently handle your support inquiries.
However, we have several plugins powered by AI which can match what you are looking for.
Explore some of these on our marketplace, or refer to this dedicated article for more information.
Can I start another scenario from the current one, or create a loop?
Absolutely, this can be very helpful to offer more options to your users and start different scenarios depending on their choices and needs, but this is also a good way to organize your Bots in a more efficient and manageable way.
We've made a guide about this which dives deeper on the subject.
Why is my Bot sometimes not starting?
There can be various reasons, make sure to double-check that the configuration of your scenario is correct, and that it is indeed deployed and enabled.
Keep in mind that the Bot will not be triggered automatically in ongoing conversations, if an operator has sent a message in the past 20 minutes, it will not start to avoid interfering.
Don't hesitate checking out the dedicated articles depending on how you wish you scenario to be triggered:
Starting a Bot Scenario when a user sends a message
Starting a Bot Scenario without a user sending a message
Starting a Bot Scenario manually
Where can I test my Bot?
The Scenario editor interface has an integrated menu to help you test your scenario directly, as covered earlier in this article. However, in some cases you may want to test it live if it contains advanced conditions, or if it is composed of several inter-connected individual scenarios.
A good way to test a scenario "live" without causing interference with your users, is to edit the terms detected by your initial "**User sent a message"** Event block, and to temporarily make it detect a term only known by you (like a password).
Updated on: 25/11/2023
Thank you!