Flow Overview

Flows enable you string together instructions for Thankful to perform in a visual, intuitive way without requiring any programming. You’ll have direct control over Thankful’s behavior and can customize to perform any desired action.

Core Concepts

Building flows involves several concepts:

• Steps: The foundation of flows. Everything that happens in a flow is because a step was configured for that to happen. Steps give you complete control over the flow and enable you to design and build any behavior at all. Each step has a different behavior, and they are each documented in the left sidebar.
• Branches: Linear “step A -> B -> C” flows can’t represent the challenging processes human agents need to follow, so flows branch down various paths. The path that’s chosen is determined by Rules.
• Memories: Memories are short-term storage of data that Thankful collects during conversations. It’s wiped when the conversation ends or after 7 days have passed, whichever comes first. Memories are unique to each user and are never shared across users or companies. Memories can influence rules thus determining the branches that are followed, and they can be used in steps, or inserted into text sent back to end-users through Statements and Questions. Many steps create and modify memories. Memories may be public or private. Public memories are included in internal notes when transferring to a human. Private memories are identical to public memories except they are excluded from that final transfer note.

For example: When looking up an order, the order data would be stored in a memory. When the order was placed may determine which actions Thankful should take, such as whether the order is even still eligible for cancelation.

Triggering Flows to Run

You’ll be able to trigger flows to run when tickets are received in a helpdesk, on a timer using automations, or when the Thankful Chat widget is first opened.

Helpdesk Tickets

Thankful integrates directly into your helpdesk to resolve a high volume of customer service tickets. Thankful sees all tickets arrive, and understands the tickets with which it can help and which tickets it should leave for agents.

Thankful decides whether to engage using deep learning models built for you by our in-house training team. With more than four years of experience and millions of processed tickets, we have mastered the art of helping machines understand human language; we wildly exceed the capabilities and accuracy of our competitors.

If Thankful understands a ticket and has been instructed to handle that ticket type, Thankful will work through a Flow, implementing your company branding, policies, and process exactly as a human agent.

Automations

Automations trigger flows to run every 5 minutes. They’re frequently used for monitoring spikes and dips in behavior such as handoffs or received tickets and sending notifications, but they can be used for any purpose which needs to happen on a repeating interval.

If you’d like assistance setting this up, please contact your account representative.

Thankful Chat

When an end-user opens the Thankful Chat widget, Thankful initiates a flow of your choice to deliver an initial message, such as “How may I help you?” and directs the user through a guided process of self-help.

Built-In Memories

Some memories are accessible to every flow automatically. These are:

• channel will be set to one of the following:
  • Unknown, Thankful Console, Email, SMS, Web, Twitter, In-App, Chat, API, Facebook, Thankful Chat
  • Note that “Thankful Chat” is different from “Chat,” which is always the helpdesk chat channel.
• emails
• phones
• greeting: Overwriting this memory will allow customizing the greeting for emails, such as forcing “Hi there,” in the first line. Thankful provides default greetings, so this is only necessary to modify if you wish to override the defaults.
• name
• attachments
• ticket which contains the following fields:
  • tags on the ticket.
  • subject if available, such as on an email.
  • brand contains the name of the Notification Endpoint currently being used.
  • external_url is the link to the ticket in the helpdesk.
  • fields are custom fields attached to the ticket. This contains an array of strings which are the values in the ticket fields.
  • dupe_ext_id refers to the original ticket ID when the current ticket has been identified as a duplicate.
  • handoff_reason for a ticket. This will only be populated during Handoff trigger workflows. It can have the following values:
    • Offensive language detected
    • Blacklist word detected
    • Excessive caps or punctuation detected