One of the essential aspects of a conversational bot is the bot’s ability to carry on a conversation with your customers. The bot should be capable of receiving a wide variety of inputs from the customer receive to handle a conversation with them.


When you build your bot using Freddy Self-service, you can choose from a range of input options for your customers to share their information with the bot. Depending on where you deploy your bot, there will be limitations to the input options that you can use. Learn more about which input options are supported in the different support channels. 


To configure the input options in a dialog, you will have to click the +Get Response option. This will show you two groups: input options and customer details. Some of these input options also support Multiselect feature — more on that here.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Input options

  • Alphanumeric input: Use this when you need to receive alphanumeric inputs from your customer.


  • Articles: Your bot will display a list of articles that you’ve listed. Your customers can read through the article in the widget itself. 


  • Button: Your bot will present the choices you’ve listed as buttons to your customer. It is advisable to use buttons when you offer a few options to the customer.


  • Carousel: Your bot will present a carousel with the choices that you’ve listed to your customers. They can go through multiple choices available. You can configure each item on the carousel to have many data points and display rich media content to the customer. These are especially useful when displaying a product catalog, order summaries, service items, etc. 



  • Custom: Use this when you need to use this for custom validation using Regular Expressions (RegEx) in this field type.


  • Date: You can choose to show a calendar for your customer to pick a date from.


  • Dropdown: The bot will present the choices you’ve listed in a dropdown to your customer. It’s advisable to use the dropdown when you are presenting many options to the customer. 


  • Feedback: You can use this to get feedback from your customer and use this data for reporting purposes. You can receive feedback in one of the following ways:
    • Star-based rating system: You can associate each point on the scale with a label.
    • Opinion poll: where you can take a poll or survey
    • Feedback field: to collect reviews in the form of free-form text from your customers.


  • File & image: You can use this to allow customers to respond to your bot by uploading images or files. Customers will be able to add attachments using the attach icon.


  • Number: Use this when you need to receive numerical input from your customer. Your bot will validate to check if your customer's input is a number, and if not, will ask them to enter just numbers.


  • Text field: Use this when you need to receive text input from your customer.


  • Time: You can choose to show a list of times from which your customer can pick — or input their own time.


Customer details

With the options under customer details, the bot can validate if the response received is one of the following.

  • Email
  • Language
  • Name
  • Phone number

Display names and aliases

Some of the input options, such as buttons, dropdown, and carousels, will have an option to use Aliases and the text displayed to the customer. While the display text is shown to your customers, your internal systems can process the alias value.  For most use-cases, it is sufficient if the display name is the same as the internal name. However, there are some cases where you need to keep these names different. Here are a few examples of such use-cases:


  • E-commerce sites can use the carousel to display products from their catalog. The display name needs to have the product and brand in it, but internally, the name can be the product id or the SKU ID to run conditional logic or API calls.
  • Airline companies can use the display name to list the routes using the source/destination names as display names while using a shorter, specific internal name in API calls to process ticket booking or other updates, 
  • B2B companies can have their employees' names listed in the display name, while internally, they can use an employee-specific code to manage their databases.


Please write to freshbots-support@freshworks.com if you have any more questions; we’ll be happy to help you.