Important Changes for the Dashboard & v7.0.1 SDK

One of our biggest releases of 2018 has changed the way you configure and present your support experience! This release allows you to offer your mobile and web users a unified conversational experience via Admin-accessible toggles in the Dashboard. This will save your team developer resources, as you will not be required to release an app update to change these configurations, and enable your Admins to freely manage these settings. Please review the following changes to keep your teams informed of what may impact them.

The Conversational Experience

Admins can now opt-in to offer a completely conversational experience to end users. When users reach out to you, they will first see a customizable greeting message which comes with multilingual support. This leads into a prompt for the user to provide their name and email if that information has not previously been collected via the Identity Bot (formerly known as the Get Info Bot) if that bot has not previously collected that info.

Based on your user’s inquiry, you can set up options to suggest relevant FAQs, which can help them quickly find their solution and cut down on the amount of new Issues coming into your Dashboard. We also display a typing indicator (now configurable from the Dashboard) during all conversations so it feels like your users are chatting with a person.

With these updates, the form-based Issue filing experience and the showSearchOnNewConversation API will both be deprecated by mid-2019. Please see the Changes for Developers section of this FAQ to learn more.

New Options for Admins in the Dashboard

We have introduced a new page for Admins to configure in-app preferences within the Dashboard. Admins will now see the following options on the new In-App SDK Configurations page:

  • Conversational Experience: Opt-in to provide a completely conversational experience for your end users
  • Agent typing indicator: Enable or disable this toggle to add a typing indicator into in-app conversations
  • Greeting message: Set up customizable and localizable messages to welcome your users in their language
  • Identity Bot: If a user has not previously provided their name and/or email, this bot (when enabled) will prompt them to provide that information when they reach out (and store it so it doesn’t have to ask again in the future)
  • QuickSearch Bot: When this add-on is enabled for your plan, this AI-powered bot will suggest FAQs to users based on their first message
  • Resolution Question: Enable this toggle to provide a ‘Did we answer all of your questions?’ Yes/No to your in-app users (previously an API)

Additional updates for the in-app experience include:

The following features and updates are now available for Web Chat:

Some additional changes you’ll want to discuss with your developers are as follows:

All of these features and changes are documented in our Knowledge Base and developer documentation. This notice will remain posted in our Knowledge Base with links to that newly updated documentation.

Changes for Developers

To support our new conversational experience, we have released new native Android and iOS SDKs v7.0.1, as well as v4.0.0 for our Unity SDK and Cocos2d-x SDK for iOS and Android.

Please check back for an ETA on our Xamarin SDK.

We strongly recommend that you switch to the new Conversational Issue Filing experience, as we will be primarily supporting this experience going forward. If your team needs time to transition to the new experience, you may continue to use the following deprecated APIs and safely ignore the warnings in the console. We will fully deprecate form-based Issue filing and remove the APIs by mid-2019.

We are now offering HMAC user verification to protect authenticated user data from impersonators, which is recommended to be used along with our new Login API. We have also introduced a new “Clear Anonymous User“ API for our SDKs (iOS, Android), and an equivalent for Web Chat, the “clearAnonymousUserOnLogin“ configuration. These may be used to clear conversation data if your users typically share devices and have the ability to submit Issues without logging in.

We have published a guide for a recommended QA testing protocol so that you can deploy your conversational experience configurations all at once. Creating a test app in the Dashboard to test your configurations before pushing them live is strongly recommended to ensure that the experience is consistent across your user base during your deployment.

Please review our documentation on iOS and Android deprecations. The following APIs will be deprecated in v7.0.0+:

  • gotoConversationAfterContactUs: Will not be applicable in the conversational experience
  • showSearchonNewConversation: Will be replaced with bot functionality in the Dashboard
  • enableTypingIndicator: Will be replaced with a toggle to enable the typing indicator in the Dashboard
  • loginWithIdentifier (iOS, Android): Will be replaced with a new Login API available in v7.0.0+
  • hideNameAndEmail, requireNameAndEmail: Will not be applicable in the conversational experience
  • setNameAndEmail, setUserIdentifier: Will be replaced by the new Login API
  • conversationPrefillText: Will be deprecated with form-based Issue filing

You should review the following changes with your web developers for managing your Web Chat widget:

  • Our Reset API will be replaced with our new “clearAnonymousUserOnLogin“ configuration: This new configuration will help in clearing conversations with anonymous users rather than all types of users
  • New API to set language preferences for Web Chat: This API will come with the option to override the user’s selected browser language if you prefer to set expectations with your users that you only support specific languages

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our support team.