Since its launch, Instabot’s Live Chat feature has maintained a “Bot-First” approach. This means that while your automated chatbot will do most of the legwork in answering your users’ questions and providing great information, Bot-First Live Chat allows you to jump into the conversation at the right time and place in the user’s conversation journey.

With Bot-First Live Chat, our goals were simple:

To bolster Instabot’s versatility by adding live chat, empowering Instabot users to speak directly with qualified prospects in bot conversation and increase the efficiency in which time & resources are spent on prospects.

One of the challenges of traditional live chat is that someone must always be available to attend to customers who interact with the your site. Constantly being online and monitoring site traffic can become a chore as the likelihood of interacting with low quality leads can increase.

Fortunately, Instabot has made it very easy to create chatbots that will qualify a prospect, notify you or your team when it’s the best time to engage in live chat, and keep the user occupied just long enough for you to jump in without losing them. Here are some strategies to build bots that better incorporate the live chat feature to help your qualification process.

Goal Completion

One strategy is to set an Instabot Goal within a conversation flow that will trigger a web push notification indicating when a user is ready and qualified to speak with a live person. The important thing to consider here is where you place your goal and how your structure the conversation path.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a bot with the intention of: 1) capturing user information and 2) encouraging those users to sign up for a demo of your product. In your conversation flow, the bot can ask for user info, e.g. name, company, email, and a use case in mind for your product.

In this scenario, it would be best to place your Goal at the part of the conversation where a user gives all of their information, which indicates a higher confidence level in the quality of the user. Users who remain engaged with the bot conversation and give all the information requested have a higher likelihood of converting. You would rather talk to those qualified people than someone who only enters some of their information, but quickly drops off.

By placing your Goal towards the end of the information entering portions of your conversation flow, Instabot can trigger a web push notification so that you are notified when a user has completed that part of your bot, and therefore ensuring that the user 1) is a better candidate to speak live with and 2) has provided contact information for your team to follow up with.

A More Direct Approach

A more direct approach is to give a user the option of opting into a live chat conversation. A simple example would have the chatbot ask the user if they would like to speak with a live agent, and set a goal to notify a live chat agent on standby. This can be useful in situations where a user may have a very specific question that isn’t answered by your automated bot conversation.

Since Instabot’s Live Chat is “Bot-First” we advise that you employ chatbots as your first line of defense when answering questions, with live chat as a thoughtful alternative to your users who may have made it through your chatbot, yet still need their question escalated. That way, users will become familiar with chatbot use on your site and see it as a useful tool that automatically gives information that they need. Live chat as an alternative also remove the frequent abuse of live chat option for more commonplace questions and requests (which we typically see with traditional live chat).

Leveraging Conditional Logic

To build off the direct approach mentioned above, you can smartly lead users through this process by using Instabot’s conditional logic feature. For a refresher on conditional logic, read our blog post about it here!

Basically, conditional logic allows you to alter a user’s conversation flow based on certain answers they give and what you might already know about each user. In the case of opting into live chat - if a user wants to speak with a live agent, they can type in free-form text responses such as:

“I want to speak with a live agent”

“Live Agent”

“Live person”

… and so on. The conditional logic node can pick up those responses, match them against the rule case created by you (does the user’s response match certain parameters I set? e.g. has the user given any useful information about themselves, or explained what their question is, have they interacted with this bot before, etc) and determine if the conditions are being met (true or false).

If the conditions are true, and the conditional logic determines that the user is asking to speak with a live person, you can utilize a goal upon the selected path to send you a notification. This way, someone on your team is able to quickly respond to that user’s request and chat with them to address their request.


If you would like to try this for yourself, or need any assistance using Bot-First Live Chat, shoot us a note over at [email protected].