Best practices for WhatsApp and SMS assistants

Last Update: Oct 2024 • Est. Read Time: 2 MIN

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With Customer Assist, you can create conversational assistants for your WhatsApp and SMS channels to help you collect information from customers before they connect with an agent to speed up response times and close conversations more quickly. This article provides tips to consider when creating menus for these assistants.

See Introduction to Customer Assist to learn more about this feature.

Getting started

Here are some basic tips to keep in mind before you create an assistant:

Start each conversation with a menu to help guide users through the experience.
Highlight the most common trigger for each option.
Focus on one-touch and low-complexity resolutions.
Use number emojis for menu options.
Save the customer's response at a conversation level. We recommend creating an attribute called CA - Step Value - (Single line text type).

Format your interactions in WhatsApp

You can format the text in your interactions to help highlight content for your users.

Formatting	Action	Example
Italic	Place an underscore on either side of your text.	_text_
Bold	Place an asterisk on either side of your text.	text
~~Strikethrough~~	Place a tilde on either side of your text.	~text~
Monospace	Place three backticks on either side of your text.	```text```

Create menus in WhatsApp and SMS

Menus help guide your users through the conversational path. We recommended using a Conditional Branch interaction that evaluates the values for the CA - Step Value. Keep the following in mind when creating menus for these assistants:

Use Match Any if you will evaluate more than one option in that interaction.
Use the Is Equal To operator to evaluate a number or emoji option.
Use the Contains operator to evaluate your keyword(s).
Redirect customers to another dialog if they enter an unexpected value that doesn't match your criteria.
We recommend not using emojis for buttons if using the Navigation buttons interaction in a WhatsApp assistant.

Examples of menus

The following section shows examples of menus you can build for WhatsApp and SMS assistants. In all of these examples, we'll use the Customer Text Response interaction to format the menu the customer will see, followed by a Conditional Branch interaction that evaluates the customer's response and redirects them to the appropriate dialog. For more information on interactions, see this article.

Starting menu

Start the conversation by presenting a menu with the most likely reasons the customer may be contacting you.

Example Customer Text Response interaction
Example Conditional Branch interaction

Feedback menu

Create a menu that asks the customer to provide feedback.

Example Customer Text Response interaction
Example Conditional Branch interaction

Another question menu

Create a menu that asks the customer if they have another question or want to end the conversation.

Example Customer Text Response interaction
Example Conditional Branch interaction

Additional tips

Use AI to respond to customers with information in your public knowledge base.
Remember to use the business schedules interaction to change the message a customer sees if they contact you inside or outside business hours. You can also take different actions based on this conditional.
You can use volume control with WhatsApp and SMS to automatically end conversations if a customer stops responding for a certain amount of time. You can also choose to mark these inactive conversations as Done automatically.
Use Intent detection to understand user queries and jump from one dialog to another based on the end-user's keywords.
Set up assistant rules to specify which dialog your assistant launches when a customer starts a conversation based on different factors.

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