I would like to request (perhaps beg or plead is the better way to express my desire) the ability to pull data into the chatbot from a database. A Zapier integration?
Our chatbots are primarily for collecting data using predefined questions. It is not designed to be an interactive two-way communication bot like many other chatbot platforms in the market.
We do not have plans to make it two-way bot by pulling dynamic data inside the chatbot response.
I understand this is a valid use case and make sense to few users. But our focus is on the primary use case, i.e. lead generation.
That is unfortunate; I have seen a few other users mention the same desire to be able to pass data back and forth between their Collect Chat bot and a database or spreadsheet.
You have a truly great product offering, with a key differentiator of ease of use in conjunction with the ability to be HIPAA-compliant. I believe being able to push/pull data would continue this, while also allowing for much more complex, engaging, and valuable conversations with users.
Though I am very disappointed, I respect your desire to remain focused on your primary use-case. But perhaps adding the ability to pull data could justify you implementing an additional pay tier? I not only would stay with Collect Chat but would also pay extra for this ability.
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I strongly agree with 2 & 3.
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Not a vital request by any means, but it would be nice to have better controls over what responses get notified to you.
In particular, I use my bot to qualify/disqualify leads - so I don’t want to be emailed with the answers of disqualified leads. Would be great if we could set it up so that you only get notified of responses based on what some specific answers say.
In my case if they answer my initial multiple choice question with 2 of the 4 options I don’t want to be notified. With the other 2 I do.
Ian
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Great suggestion Ian. We are working on an advanced email routing system based on answers. We will definitely consider your feedback while developing this feature.
Cheers,
Shyjal
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Polling Function
Imagine a community group where you seek to gain consensus
Imagine sending a social link to gather data under a method where you can see the community position on the importance/priority of particular topics
It would be great to be able to add a polling feature that allows collect.chat to provide an unranked list of items where a respondent could rank those items in order of importance.
The example provided is:
Hi,
Can you provide your full name please
Response
Thanks @Can you…, we (Entity or individual) are seeking community feedback on what drinks we should stock in the cafe.
Can you spend a little time to provide your feedback - Yes No
Response Yes
Out of the following drinks can you please rank from 1-n? (list)
[ 5(n) ] Latte
[ 3 ] Short Black
[ 2 ] Hot Chocolate
[ 4 ] Powerade
[ 1 ] Etc.
(User add numbers or other method to each item as shown above - Validate response)
That’s sensational @ Can you… and will help us provide a range of drinks for our community that they want to buy, reducing wastage and unnecessary expense.
We will provide feedback on our website once we have 50 responses.
Have great day!
Basically its a voting method encapsulated into one string
Meeting scheduler with a little more juice would be terrific. At worst case the concept of allowing a user to set three unique times to call/meet provides enough information to make an informed response. AND value to Collect is that integration to user calendar provides some lift $ for you to charge this per calendar integration
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Ok Courtney, we understand your requirement. Currently polls as you mentioned to a certain extent can be done with the Multi-Choice message type
For example:
If you were to ask a question like the above, you would get the polling stats in our reports section as:
However, there will be no functionality for the user to see this. Only you as the Bot-Maker can see this stats after the chatbot collects all the data. A poll where user can press “Show results” is not something we can offer at the moment.
Regards,
Aslam
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Thanks for prompt reply. I am aware of that feature, but its quite different to the request because in your scenario there is only one selection out of three so it ranks the items across a user subset based on one vote only.
In my scenario i need to understand the preferences in order as the parties analysing the data need to make a decision on more than one item
Eg. Think of politics: please provide your preferences based on the three political parties. A user in this scenario would not select only their favourite but the order of favourites to provide a deeper data set as the collector really needs to know number 2 and 3 in order of preference by each voter.
Your way provides one choice each, whereas i was selecting 3 chouces in order each.
Hope this makes sense as the granuality is important.
Thanks
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At the moment, we don’t have plans to introduce such a feature for polls. If we get more requests, we will definitely consider it in the future.
Sorry to disappoint you,
Aslam
Can you integrate some sort of workflow diagram to see where the conversation is going as currently 1 bug list makes you lose where you are going in the workflow and having a flow diagram would solve this and help much more.
Making a Flow Diagram is definitely on our Product Roadmap. Please stay tuned 
Regards,
Aslam
I really like the interface. it’s one of the easiest to learn, but there are several challenges i am finding:
- Lack of formatting ability within the text and image areas:
- Can’t change the color of text.
- I’d like to be able to edit image or at least resize them within the text/image window.
- I’d like to be able to allow someone to choose from 3 images as options.
- Can’t have active links within the text.
-
The ability to export the script so I can see the flow or see broken areas…would be very helpful.
-
More out of the box integrations with key applications such as CRM, Paypal, Quickbooks, Calendars, etc would be nice. Sometimes Zapier is a bit of a pain.
Thanks
Kevin
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Splendid job with the freshly published “Book appointment” feature!
Out of curiosity is there any possibility to publish the appointments as a ical feed so could sync it easily with my google calendar?
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Thank you so much for the feedback Juho.
We are sending an ical file attachment along with the notification mail for each appointment. Is this what you are looking for?
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Was referring to web subscription protocol for the ical data
In this case the appointments captured by individual chatbot would be stored in the same ical file that bot author can easily subscribe to (webcal protocol is supported by google/outlook calendars). If understood correctly all the saved appointments are already stored in the same location under bot responses (?)
In the first version would be able to see the appointments
Second version could read data from the calendar:
- a predefined keyword that is interpreted as unavailable for booking
- I could add appointment named “unavailable” from 1st of May to 14th of May, and those dates would be blocked on the calendar in the bot UI
3 Likes
Great suggestions. We will definitely consider this while improving the feature.
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Hi guys I will like to kindly make a feature request for the ability to have images as response options for both Multi Choice and Multi Select questions.
Currently you can only insert image in questions not the response options.
Something like below where the options have an image plus a text label and you can click on an image to select it.
This is a deal breaker for me as my survey involves showing customers images which they have to be selecting from.
Thanks
