Best practices

In order to provide a great conversational experience here are some of the best practices we advise every integrator to follow.

Please note that these guidelines are important for your app to pass the iAdvize review process.

Awaits / timeout on Bot Transfers

Our bot transfer process allows you to set any timeout value you might like.

Please be advised that you should not set a timeout value inferior to 15 seconds. Under that delay our system will not have a sufficient amount of time to verify availability.

This delay is perfectly acceptable in term of conversational experience and is required for the transfer to operate correctly.

Please note that if you don't specify a transferOptions, the timeout value will be 60 seconds

You can specify a timeout in a transferOptions key as below :

{
  "type": "transfer",
  "distributionRule": "ef4670c3-d715-4a21-8226-ed17f354fc44",
  "transferOptions": {
    "timeout": {
      "value": 20,
      "unit": "seconds"
    }
  }
}

Delay your answers

We strongly advise to put an await between each answer your bot is going to send to the visitor to enhance the conversational experience with your bot. You can use an await of a few seconds for each message you send to the visitor. Answering directly would be too unnatural otherwise.

Do not disguise your bot as a human

We will refuse any integration that masks the fact that a bot isn't a human. According to our experience, we know that it results in important satisfaction drop. You should state at the beginning of the conversation that the operator is not human. Also provide a specific avatar that makes it clear that the agent is a bot.

Be careful about the length of your messages

You should never send a message over 450 characters long (technical limitation). We even advise not to send more than 250 characters per message (optimal Ux). To offer a great conversational experience try to write short and concise answers. If you really need to send a long answer we recommend splitting your entire message in smaller ones of max. 250 characters that are semantically coherent.

Do not say hello twice

A preconfigured welcome message is available for all of our clients. If your bot says hello at the start of every new conversation it will results in the visitor receiving a similar message two times in a few seconds.

To deliver a better conversational experience, your bot can skip any notion of welcoming message and just present itself as a bot.

Diversify your answers

Try and offer multiple versions of your common answers. It will help you deliver a better experience instead of a repetitive robotic one.