Providing options when a question or request cannot be answered

No matter how well your assistant is designed, customers can sometimes encounter issues with the chatbot understanding them or doing what they want. Your assistant can automatically help customers recover from many situations, and you can configure how it responds.

How error conditions are handled

Error situations that your assistant can recover from:

Your assistant cannot understand your customer's request.
Your customer does not provide a valid response to a question.
Your customer requests to speak to a live agent.

Your assistant can detect error conditions and give customers the chance to correct them. In addition, the built-in Fallback action provides a way to automatically connect customers to a live agent if they need more help.

When the assistant can't understand your customer's request

When you build actions, you train your assistant on what your customers might ask for. The Customer starts with section of each action provides examples of customer input that trigger the action. The assistant uses natural language processing to recognize customer input that is similar to these examples. This happens at the beginning of the conversation, or after an action completes and the assistant is ready for another action.

You cannot anticipate every possible request, so sometimes customers send input that your assistant fails to match to any action. The input may be phrased in a way that the assistant cannot understand, or customers ask for things that your assistant is not designed to handle.

Unrecognized input of this sort triggers the built-in No matches action. To see how this action works, click Set by assistant in the list of actions, and then click No matches.

By default, this action has two steps, and each step is conditioned on the No action matches count session variable. This built-in variable is automatically incremented with each consecutive unrecognized input. Therefore, the behavior of the No matches action differs depending on how many times in a row the user says something that the assistant fails to understand.

For the first three unrecognized messages, step 1 executes. This step outputs a message that the assistant did not recognize the user's input, and asks the user to try again. You can edit the message, or modify the number of times that the assistant responds with this message.

When the user sends input that successfully triggers an action, the No action matches count session variable is reset to 0.
If the user tries more than three times and the assistant still does not understand, step 2 executes. Step 2 calls the Fallback action, which offers other options such as connecting to a live agent. For more information, see Editing the fallback action.

You can edit the No matches action just as you can any other action by changing the existing steps and adding or deleting steps. If you change the No matches action, you might accidentally break your assistant's ability to recover from errors in the conversation. If this happens, you can re-create the default steps.

You can set how often customers are routed to No matches by changing a global setting for actions.

From the Actions page of the assistant, click Global settings .
On the Clarifying questions tab, you can edit the No matches section.
- Rarely (default)
- Sometimes
- More often

Adding examples of unsupported input

By default, the No matches action is triggered only when the user's input does not match any defined action.

If you can anticipate certain user requests that your assistant does not support, you can add these requests as example phrases in the Customer starts with section of the No matches action. Adding example phrases helps to ensure that these requests are sent directly to the No matches action rather than triggering a different action by mistake. You can also upload or download example phrases in a comma-separated value (CSV) file. For more information, see Adding more examples.

When your customer gives invalid answers

When a step in an action asks your customer to answer questions or provide additional information, the assistant expects a particular response type, such as a number, date, or text string. (For more information, see Collecting information from your customer.) The assistant checks the customer's response to ensure it fits the expected response type; this process is called validation.

For most customer response types, the assistant is able to understand valid responses in various formats. For example, for a time value, 2:15 PM and a quarter past two in the afternoon are both acceptable. But if the user provides a value that the assistant cannot interpret as matching the expected response type (for example, a response of purple when asked for a number), a validation error results.

When a validation error occurs, the assistant asks the customer to try again. By default, the assistant allows three attempts for a valid response. After the third attempt, another invalid attempt triggers the Fallback action, which offers other options such as connecting to a live agent. For more information, see Editing the fallback action.

Customizing validation for a response

When you edit a step that expects a customer response, you can customize how validation errors are handled.

Click Edit validation to see the validation options.
For all customer responses except free text, you can customize the following options:
- In the Response 1 field, specify the text of the message the assistant sends when the customer's response does not match the expected response type. For example, the default validation error message for a numeric value is I didn't catch that. Enter a number. You might want to customize this message to be more specific, such as Enter the number of people in your group.
- If you want to use several validation responses, click Add Response to add more validation messages. The number of validation responses you can enter depends upon the value in the If attempts exceed field.
- In the If attempts exceed field, click + or -, or directly edit the number, to change how many consecutive attempts the customer can make before the Fallback action is triggered. Or, if you enabled response modes, you can use the number of step validation attempts from the response mode that you are using.
- Select Repeat Assistant Says response if you want the customer to see or hear the original question. For example, following a validation message of I’m sorry, please choose a day when we are open, the assistant repeats When do you want to visit? We are open Monday through Friday.

For date, time, and numeric customer responses, you can customize the validation to check for a specific answer, such as a range of dates or a limited currency amount. Each choice is optional so you can build a validation specific to the response.

Validation choices
Response type	Validation choices
Number	Minimum, maximum
Date	After date, before date, specific days of the week
Time	Start time, end time
Currency	Minimum, maximum
Percentage	Minimum, maximum

When your customer asks to speak to a live agent

At any point in the conversation, your customer might ask to speak to a live agent. The built-in Fallback action is preconfigured with example input that detects such requests; you can edit the Customer starts with section of the Fallback action to add more examples. You can also upload or download example phrases in a comma-separated value (CSV) file. For more information, see Adding more examples.

Editing the fallback action

The built-in Fallback action is automatically provided with each assistant and cannot be deleted. However, you can edit the Fallback action to modify the conversation that your users have with the assistant when errors occur. For example, you might want to add steps or modify step conditions to provide more control of how specific error conditions are handled.

To edit the Fallback action, click Set by assistant in the list of actions, and then click Fallback.

Whenever the Fallback action is triggered, the assistant also sets a value for the Fallback reason session variable. This value indicates what caused the Fallback action to be triggered. By default, this variable can have one of five values:

Step validation failed: The customer repeatedly replied with invalid answers for the expected customer response type.
Agent requested: The customer directly asked to be connected to a live agent.
No matches: The customer repeatedly made requests or asked questions that the assistant did not understand.
Danger word detected: The customer uses words or phrases that match the Connect to agent step in the Trigger word detected action.
Profanity detected: The customer repeatedly used words or phrases that match the Show warning step in the Trigger word detected action.

For more information about the Trigger word detected action, see Detecting trigger words.

The Fallback action defines five conditional steps, one for each possible value of the Fallback reason variable. Each step sends a message to the customer, based on the error condition, and then uses the Connect to agent feature to transfer the conversation to a live agent. (For more information about this feature, see Connecting to a live agent.) You can modify these steps if you want to handle an error condition in a different way.