Lesson 2.6. Subscribe to a sequence in case of a drop off

A common issue among users is the fact that somebody who is in the middle of your chat flow, drops off in the middle of it. There’s literally a ton of reasons for this, ranging from “the baby started crying”, “the phone rang”, “I had to pee” or whatnot. All fine, but how do you retrieve those users, how do you get them to engage again?

The solution to this is actually pretty simple and you can find it within the sequences. What you have to do, is assign/subscribe your new user to a sequence as soon as he or she engages with your chatbot.

How does that work? The DropOff sequence

We use a default "contact form" flow for almost all our flows where we ask for personal information. It's clean and easy to keep track of. At the point where you ask for user information, just send the user to a new flow:

In the image shown here, the user is sent to the next flow where all information is gathered. You can use the action to “subscribe to sequence” right at the start. If you placed any other anchors (like our Sent to Get User Data), you can untag those since they are now here.

The Get User Data Flow

Now, your user can go through your chat flow and interact all the way until the end is reached. If the user reaches the end, you unsubscribe from sequence and remove the anchortag(s) you used to keep track of their path. If however the user does drop off anywhere along the way, it is not the end of the World. In the previous step you subscribed the user to, what we call, a DropOff sequence.

Within the time you set (anything from 15 minutes, to for example 23 hours) the user is being contacted by your messenger bot again. If done right, you kept track of the path your user took when walking through your flow by setting tags along the way. This enabled you to let him/her know with your DropOff sequence where (s)he left off. Now you can ask your user the following question: 

“Hey John, I see you had a talk with our virtual chat help yesterday. Maybe something came in between, I see you did not finish our survey. Would you like to continue the survey now? We would really appreciate it!  [yes][no]”

or, as in our sample below in the image:

"Hi {{FirstName}}, I noticed you have not been able to finish your inquiry.
Are you still interested in our service?  [yes][no]”

If the answer is Yes now, you just redirect the user to the flow where (s)he left off yesterday so (s)he can continue. You obviously have conditions in place to check where the user left off.

It’s sort of like an abandoned shopping cart reminder. If he says No, you just unsubscribe him from your sequence and tell him Thanks for his answer. Always keep it nice and friendly!

Here is a copy of the DropOff sequence flow we use (not with the same text as above) and this works very well.