MobileMonkey 101: How to Choose the Right Widget in Conversation Design

Widgets are used within chat starters and dialogues to make a conversation flow for your bot. There are a number of different types to choose from.

Each widget has its own purpose. Let's review a couple of the most commonly used widgets.

  1. Quick Question widget: The Quick Question widget is critical to converting conversations into captured leads. The Quick Question widget is used to collect information from your contacts to save as an attribute or to dictate the conversation flow.
    There are a few options within the Quick Question widget for setting what the customer will reply with: multiple choice, free-form text, email address, or phone number.
    Multiple: Allows you to give users a list of multiple choice answers to choose from. You can add up to 11 multiple choice responses.
    There are some additional options to be aware of in the multiple choice response setup:
  • Prevent free form responses: This will prevent the user chatting with the bot from entering free-form text as a response to this question. When "Prevent free form responses" is selected, should a user type in a response rather than click on a multiple-choice response, the bot will repeat the question asking them to use one of the multiple choice responses.
  • Save response to attribute: An attribute is a field in your contact database. "Save response to attribute" will allow you to save the user's response to their contact profile.
    Examples of an attribute include first name, email address and phone number.
    Attributes are useful because they allow you to save information to your contacts, creating a rich customer profile, and create meaningful audience segments. Read more about audiences and attributes here.
  • If you would like, you can send people to different follow-up bot responses based on which multiple-choice answer they choose.

To design a different conversation path for multiple-choice answers, click on the multiple-choice answer and open the menu: "Take users to a new Dialogue?"

Select a dialogue that you already created or create a new dialogue here.

Text: If you want to ask the user a question that is open to a free-form text reply, use User replies with: Text.

Phone/Email: When you want to ask the user for their phone number or email address, use User replies with: Email or User replies with: Phone. The bot will validate that the provided information matches the email or phone number format.

  1. Notification: The Notification widget is a PRO feature used to alert your customer support, marketing or sales teams of important conversations or leads. Notifications can be sent via mobile app or desktop browser Push Notification, via email, or via a Follow-up designation in the MobileMonkey inbox.
    The Notification widget is critical for saving time, increasing efficiency and ensuring you don't miss important conversations by automatically alerting your team when a high-value conversation requires follow-up.
  2. Zap/Connection: The Zap/Connection widget is a Unicorn feature that syncs data from MobileMonkey to other business systems via the Zapier integration application.
    When you want to send contact data to any other system your business uses, including an email marketing platform, webinar platform, CRM or other system, add the Zapier/Connection widget to the dialogue. Learn more about using Zapier integrations with MobileMonkey here.
    The Zap/Connection widget is critical for saving time, increasing efficiency and automating lead nurture and follow-up by connecting MobileMonkey to your other business systems used for sales, support and marketing automation.
  3. Text widget: This ones pretty simple, it allows you to add text for your bot to use in conversation. It also allows you to add menu buttons. Click on the buttons to choose what happens when a customer picks this option, it can either direct to a new dialogue, start a phone call, direct to a URL or handover to another app.

Add a TAG to a button in order to attach this TAG to a contact who clicked on a button on a text widget

You can only add a tag for buttons that are assigned to a dialogue and URL.

  1. Attribute & Tag widgets: Use an attribute or tag widget in your flow to save certain information about the customer at any point in time. Attributes and tags can both be used to create audiences that can later be targeted through chat blasts or ads. The difference between the two is mainly that an attribute is a field you are trying to fill in with a single value that is assigned to the contact while one contact can be tagged multiple times with different values.
  2. Form widget: Forms are formatted as a series of quick questions. Set up will be very similar to setting up a Quick Question widget with key differences.
  • The form widget gives you the ability to mark a question as a Conversion action.
  • The form widget does not have the ability to connect multiple choice responses in a question to a different dialogue.
  1. 1-Time Notification widget: The 1-Time Notification is a Facebook Messenger supported feature. Facebook Messenger has specific rules about using the API to follow-up with contacts and one permitted use case for following up with contacts in the future is powered by the One-Time Notification. Learn more here.
  2. Typing widget: Use this to make you bot experience seem more human. It will show typing bubbles for a dictated amount of time so that it seems like a human is typing to the user.
  3. Gallery widget: This is like a scrollable menu. It allows you to add photos, a title and description that users can scroll through to find what they are looking for. You can also add buttons below each image in Gallery widget and these buttons are like the ones in the Text widget.
  4. Navigate widget: Use this widget to send everyone, or just certain audiences, to a new dialogue at any point in the conversation flow.
  5. Attachment, GIF, Image widgets: These are pretty self explanatory. Add images, animated GIFs and attachments to your dialogue to make your bot more dynamic!


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