Build chatbots and forms with Resolve flows

Resolve flows are a powerful tool to ensure your team is focused on answering the most important conversations. Flows can help you gather information about a customer’s inquiry, then can directly resolve the inquiry, escalate to a human teammate, or hand off to an AI agent. 

Flows are ideal for addressing inquiries that follow standardized paths or workflows. This allows you to create a chatbot decision tree or chat widget experience to collect information and route customers to the correct team for resolution.

By using flows, visitors can submit essential information before connecting with a team member. This saves valuable time for human teammates, allowing them to concentrate on troubleshooting and resolving issues rather than gathering details.

You must have Front company admin OR workspace admin permissions to create and edit Resolve flows.

You must have a Resolve channel set up in order to use flows. See this article to review how to configure a Resolve channel and its settings.

Step 1

Click the gear icon, then select the workspace you'd like to create a flow in.

Step 2

Click Bots and engagement in the left menu.

Step 3

In the Resolve flows tab, click Create flow. Enter a name for your flow and click Create. This name is public-facing and visible to visitors in the Resolve widget.

You can always update the name or description by clicking the Start step in your flow.

Step 4

In the flow builder, click the plus icon (+) to add a new step to your flow. You can also click the existing steps to edit them. 

See below to learn about each step type.

Step 5

Click the Save as draft button to save changes to your flow. Once you’re finished configuring your flow, click the Publish button. 

Step 6

Navigate to your Resolve channel, then select Structured flows in the Build tab. Select the flow(s) you want to power your Resolve channel, then click Save changes.

Step 7

If you haven’t done so already, navigate to the Deploy tab in your Resolve channel to embed the Resolve widget in your web pages. See this article to learn more.

There are different categories of step types you can use in your flow.

• Visitor-facing steps: Visitor-facing steps allow you to send messages / collect information from your visitor, and will be interactions that are visible in the widget on your website.

• Internal-facing steps: Internal-facing steps are actions that affect the structure of your flow (i.e., any paths that are created) and will also impact any attributes on the conversation that’s created in Front once the flow ends (i.e., tags).

Subtrees make it much easier to quickly build and manage your Resolve flow. If you have a series of steps used multiple times throughout your flow, consider creating a subtree with these steps instead.

You can build your subtree once and add it anywhere you want in your main flow. Any edits you make to your subtree will automatically apply wherever it appears in your flow.

Creating a subtree

There are two ways to create a subtree:

1. Click the Subtrees button on the bottom left of the flow builder, then select Create a subtree in the menu.

2. Select Run a subtree in the “Add a new step” menu, then click Create a subtree in the resulting menu.

Editing a subtree

You can edit a subtree by clicking on the subtree step in your flow and selecting Edit this subtree in the panel, or by clicking on the subtree you want to edit in the Subtrees button on the bottom left corner of the flow builder.

Important to know

• Subtrees are currently flow-specific. You cannot use the same subtree across multiple different Resolve channels or flows.

• There can only be one path coming out of a subtree. If your subtree ends in multiple paths (for example, if you have a multiple-choice question in your subtree), these paths will automatically merge into one path at the end of the subtree. See screenshot below.

Use the options in the "End of flow" step to control how Resolve hands off conversations to your teammates.

Use case: Automatically archive and close conversations that were resolved by your flow and don't need follow up.

• After a visitor reaches the “End of flow” step in your Resolve flow, a Resolve conversation will automatically be created in the default inbox configured for your Resolve channel.

• The conversation will be created with an “Archived” status and your team will not be notified or need to respond.

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that flow.

• In the Resolve widget, the conversation will end and your visitor will be prompted to start a new conversation.

Use case: Automatically route Resolve conversations to your teammates for immediate support.

• After a visitor reaches the “End of flow” step in your flow, a Resolve conversation will automatically be created within the default inbox configured for your Resolve channel.

• The conversation will be created with an “Open” status, so a teammate can easily hop in and continue the thread.

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that flow.

Use case: Automatically route Resolve conversations to an AI agent for resolution.

• After a visitor reaches the “End of flow” step in your flow, a Resolve conversation will automatically be created within the default inbox configured for your Resolve channel.

• The conversation will be created with an “Open” status and assigned to the AI agent. Your team will not be notified or need to respond. 

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that flow.

• Any inbox rules you have configured will apply to your Resolve conversation.

• A flow will never start again after a conversation has been created within Front. It will only run for new Resolve conversations.

• If your flow auto-archives the Resolve conversation, make sure you add the Conversation currently open condition to your assignment rule. This ensures that your inbox assignment rules won’t trigger and assign that conversation to your teammates.

On your website, the Resolve flow will start when visitors open the Resolve widget. Customers will have to go through the entire flow before they can be connected to a human on your team.

If they provided an email address, they’ll also receive an email with a link to the request. When they click Go to conversation, they’ll navigate to the Resolve widget where they can continue replying to the conversation, or review previous conversations.

Your customer will see that the conversation has ended, and they will be asked to start a new conversation (which will restart the Resolve flow) if they have another inquiry.

Yes. Customers can restart the Resolve flow by clicking the new chat icon on the top right of the widget. This makes it easy for customers to restart if they accidentally clicked the wrong option or went down the wrong path in the flow.

No. Flows are only available for Resolve channels at this time.

Yes. You can add up to 700 steps in a flow.

Yes. Please contact our Support team and send us the name(s) of the flow(s) you'd like to duplicate.

Once your flow is duplicated, you can disconnect the channel from your old flow in your Resolve settings, then reassign the channel to the new flow.

Yes you can build rules based on visitor responses to your flow questions by leveraging tags. You can add a tag anywhere in your flow (for example, right after each multiple choice option), and then you can build routing, assignment, and more rules that include that tag as a condition.

In the example below, you can configure a rule set to route the conversation to either the Support or Sales inbox by leveraging the “Support” or “Sales” tag in your routing rule.

See the Resolve article for more information.