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Transitioning from Birdseed to Front Chat

  • 14 February 2024
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william_riddell
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We’re looking to move away from our website widget app birdseed (which comes with a usage fee) as the Front Chat bot comes free with our Front package. So far it seems as though the chat bot only works as such, and can’t also function as a widget like birdseed can. Has anyone previously used birdseed and transitioned over to Front chat? Any hints and tips welcome!

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Best answer by cody_mckee 15 February 2024, 23:28

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helena
Userlevel 4
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Hey @william_riddell! I’m curious about your use cases for Birdseed so we can advise on whether Front Chat can replace them (I hope so!). Front Chat is very powerful, has automations, and chatbot capabilities. 

Helena, Product Education Lead
william_riddell
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Hey @helena , thanks for your response!

 

We currently use Birdseed as a widget on our website and I am aware of some of the features we have will be available on front chat (such as collecting customer contact information). For context we are an Edinburgh-based property letting and estate agent

 

At the moment we use it for the following:

  • Tenant Helpdesk - when tenants click on this icon they are given 3 options: report a repair, service notice on their property or request a tenancy swap. Each of these options is a little resource link (similar to the resource links in front knowledge hub) that takes them outside of the birdseed widget and to our maintenance reporting portal, tenant notice form and tenant swap over form respectively
  • Prospective customers requesting a property valuation (they would be looking to rent out their property or sell their current property) - I noticed that Front Chat only allows you to have 3 fields to collect contact information at a time, and currently our widget has about 5 separate fields (we also ask them some questions to understand their enquiry better)
  • Call Us - this takes them to a separate page on the widget with our phone number as well as a interactive map showing our office location
  • Join our newsletter - again this is a customer contact field to collect customer contact information so should be easy enough to replicate

Feel free to take a look at the widget on our website: www.umega.co.uk

 

We are looking to see if birdseed can be replicated via the front chat, and if possible, we’d look to build on this and potentially bring in a chat function with our team (currently we have this switched off on birdseed)

 

Thanks for your help!

cody_mckee

Hey @william_riddell - thanks for writing in! I’m Cody, an engineer at Front on our chat team. 

I went ahead and took a peek at the widget available on your website and put together a quick demo in our flow builder. You can see the simplistic flow I’ve built below:
 


This flow directs the user to one of your main options as the first step. The Tenant Helpdesk would use a multiple choice question to further direct the user to the available links.

For the other two responses, we first collect customer contact info and then we can further process the request. For the newsletter response, I’ve gone ahead and automatically tagged the conversation and then archived it. You could potentially do some actions using these tags with rules, for example.

For every End of path step, you can choose whether or not you’d like to keep the conversation open after completing the path. This would allow you to choose to deflect users if their request is handled by a link or allow them to continue chatting with a support staff member. These messages will come into the front chat channel you set up for the widget.

Here’s a quick example from my testing environment:
(this was originally supposed to be a gif, so bear with me)


For the “Call us” page, that would likely be a message step where you show the phone number and perhaps a google maps link. We don’t have the capability to embed an interactive map into the widget at this time.

I know you also called out only collecting 3 fields at a time for customer information. At this time the limit is still 3 in a single step, but it is possible to include multiple customer information steps if more information is needed. We also have the ability to parse open-ended responses from a user and either redirect them based on the result or use AI-powered search to resolve their request from a knowledge base, which may serve as viable alternatives.

Please let me know if you have additional questions! 

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