Feature Guide: Playbooks for Chat Experiences

Prerequisites

In order to use this feature, you must be a Chat Experiences customer. Additionally, you must have the Terminus Chat Experiences script installed on your website.

Article quick links:

• Feature Overview
• Creating a Playbook
  • Chatbots
  • Types of Plays
  • Tokenization
  • Targeting
  • Message Delays
• Playbook Prioritization

Feature Overview

Playbooks for Chat Experiences allow Terminus users to build sophisticated, highly engaging chat workflows in one seamless interface. The Terminus Playbook builder combines the power of linear plays with a dynamic bot builder, so users can easily visualize their chat logic hierarchy and potential routing paths for chat conversations.

With Chat Playbooks, Terminus users can create more advanced bot logic for lead qualification, take action based on target account identification (for example, pushing accounts to Marketo or Salesforce), and create a more robust, conversational bot experience.

Creating a Playbook

Playbooks can be accessed via the "Playbooks" navigation link.

To create a new playbook, select the “Create Playbook” button in the top right corner of the application.

 

Chatbots

When creating a new Playbook, you’ll first be routed to the “Chatbot” tab. A Chatbot allows you to simulate conversations with prospects and customers to gather information about their needs, and direct them to the correct team members or to other relevant resources.

Here, you’ll determine what specific plays you want to run, based on the actions or attributes of visitors interacting with the chat.

By default, all Chatbots will contain a Greeting and a Concluding play. A Concluding play allows you to conditionalize what happens at the end of a Playbook. For example, instead of pushing all bot traffic to your CRM, you can select to push only chats that meet certain criteria.

To add a new play, select “Add+” at the top of the Chatbot builder:

 

Types of Plays

When creating a new play in your Playbook, you’ll have several options to choose from, including:

• Standard Plays: These plays present the visitor with a message (usually a question), and then provide a list of predefined options, or actions, for them to choose from.
• Data Ask Plays: With these plays, users can use Data Asks to gather information from the user relevant to your end goals.
• Logic Plays: These plays allow users to create bot paths that are dictated by any knowledge the bot has at the time the play is called. These paths can be determined based on the page being visited, the time of day, visitor information collected, UTM parameters presented, etc.
• Routing Plays: These plays allow users to route chat visitors to specific team members or Routing Groups for direct interaction, based on the visitor’s behavior, or their known information.

To learn more about the specific play types that can be used to build a Playbook, check out this article. 

Playbook Visual Chart

To make play building even more seamless, we’ve also introduced a visual path alongside the play builder.

The visual component can be expanded and adjusted, so you easily see what the potential user experience will be when visitors engage in your chat experience.

Tokenization

Within the message and bot response sections of your plays, users have the option to use tokens to further personalize the chat experience.

 

Tokenization is a style of personalization that dynamically updates the information displayed on bot messages based on the user’s behavior, or other known attributes.

Tokens can be based on information from a Data Ask (like Company Name, First Name, Email), Data Element, or any UTM parameters passed from the visitor.

The ability to add a token into a message or a response will be indicated by the “</>” icon at the bottom of the text box.

 

When creating a token, it’s recommended to always have a fallback token, or a different value that can be used in the event the system is not able to identify the desired value for the visitor. You can have a fallback set to another dynamic token, and/or have a default fallback value in the event that no data for tokenization is available.

Targeting

While the Chatbot determines what actions should be deployed during a chat experience, the Targeting section is used to determine when and where the Chatbot should be displayed.

A “Default Target” can be used as a fallback, or “always on,” option in the event that visitors do not meet the criteria of other targeting criteria you’ve set. For example, the bot should always fire on specific pages on your website, or when visitors from a specific geographic location are visiting.

Targeting can be defined using the following parameters:

• Page Title
• Page URL
• UTM
• Visitor Location
• Visitor Referrer
• Page Scrolled (If the visitor scrolls on the page at any point)
• Time Passed (After a certain amount of time on the page has passed)
• Page Focus
  • “Loses focus” is detected when the visitor’s cursor leaves the in-view area of the page. Conversely, “Restores focus” is detected when the visitor’s cursor comes back into the in-view area of the page
• User Device
• Time Range
• Whether the visit occurred during “in range” or “off range” hours, based on the availability of your teams
• Visitor Information (Previously supplied information from the visitor during a chat interaction)
• Information from a Data Ask or a Data Element

The rule builder also supports “And” and “Or” functionality to allow for sophisticated and flexible targeting logic.

In the example above, the Chatbot would appear when the page URL the visitor is on = “termius.com/chat” OR when the page title = “Chat Pricing” AND the UTM parameter “pardot_campaign” = “February_push.”

 

Message Delays

The Message Delay Feature for Chat Experiences allows users to:

• Control the momentum of their chat playbooks.
• Re-engage visitors after directing them to a new page. 

How to Add a Message Delay

Step 1

When choosing the next play in Playbooks, you will see a blue dropdown that says “Immediately” by default.

By clicking on this dropdown, you can choose “After Delay”. This will add a pause before the bot displays the next play.

Step 2 

You can then customize the length of the delay in seconds.

Note: You cannot add delays when a Routing Play or “End Chat” is the next play.

Examples of When to Use a Message Delay

We recommend adding message delays when you:

• Send multiple messages consecutively.

• Send a long message that requires more time for your visitor to read.

• Want to build suspense in your playbooks.

• Redirect a visitor to a new page.

  • You can add a longer delay to re-engage the visitor after they’ve had a moment to view the new page.

 

Playbook Prioritization

When creating multiple Playbooks, there may be scenarios where certain plays could fire at the same time, based on the targeting rules or Chatbot settings selected. Additionally, there may be certain plays you want to give precedence to based on the visitor’s attributes or behaviors. For this reason, we’ve included the ability to prioritize, or stack rank, Playbooks.

 

To determine the desired priority order of your Playbooks, select the priority rank of each Playbook with the numerical dropdown option on the left side of each Playbook. Once your priority order is set, select “Save” to implement all changes.

When a visitor lands on a page with an active chat experience, the system will automatically navigate through the targeting rules in each Playbook, starting at the top of your priority order. Once a targeting rule returns a “true” value, it uses the actions defined in the Playbook to determine the chat path. If it does not find any targeting rules that apply to the visit, it moves down the priority list to the next Playbook.

Note: A default Playbook should always be designated. In the event that no targeting rules return as 'true’ from other playbooks, the default playbook will automatically run.