What’s New with Flow Builder? Q2 2022
New features include improved bot building experiences, connecting bots to external systems and Flow Builder for social channels.
Zendesk’s Flow Builder tool introduced a number of new features in Q2.
These include the ability to add your conversational bot to any third-party social channels connected to your Zendesk account, including Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram Direct, Twitter DM, and WeChat.
In addition, its new advanced automation capabilities enable you to build smarter bots with less efforts.
Admins no longer have to maintain a single, long, complex flow – they can now create separate answers the bot can use to address individual customer topics.
This new capability also allows them to train bots by adding common phrases customers may use to describe their intent, improving customer service outcomes.
The “Make an API Call” step in Flow Builder allows you connect your bot to external settings and surface data into its response. So it can be used to pull product information into your bot messages and will eventually be used to push conversation details out to your CRM.
However, the ‘Make an API call’ step currently can’t collect specific information about the customer (such as ID, name, email, order number) and send it to an internal CRM. This requires a “collect information” step which has not been released so far. It is on the roadmap to be delivered in the next few months.
See Comparing the bot building experiences for a roundup of the differences between the changes and Building a bot using answers for information on working with the new features.