3rd party Bot integration and Apple Business Chat

App Platform
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I would like to know how to integrate a 3rd party bot into Freshdesk. We have already built a bot that has a Chat interface (web). Customer is looking to use Apple Business Chat (and the Web interface) but they want to integrate both to Freshdesk to have that be the “live” chat agent (if escalated).

Since Freshworks has Apple Business Chat integration, I would think that we could plug our bot in to Freshworks so that someone using Freshworks ABC integration (to initiate a chat) would be able to initiate with a 3rd party Bot for automation.

How can this be done, if so, which API’s can we use to plug-in our automation (bot).
Also, are there examples of this?

Thank you

3

Hi Gary,

Welcome to the community.
Integrating your 3rd party bot is same as integrating a new channel. Please refer this article on

BYOC - Bring your own channel

Hope this helps.

.

1 Like
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Thanks for the reply. But let me be clarify something, when I say “bot”, I mean automation (not a web chat bot, but the automation behind it). The process of executing some automation and returning that result to Apple Business Chat before it gets to Freshdesk. So for example, if someone comes in on ABC, we’d like to intercept that process, execute our automation (bot), let them interact with that, then if they need to be escalated to Freskdesk (for live chat), they can… but basically have ABC be communicating to our bot automation platform and then pass that back to Freshdesk if needed.

Is that possible with a BYOC?

Thank you

5

Hi Gary,

As mentioned earlier Freshchat provides APIs and Webhooks for integration with any 3rd party. Depending on which interface is going to be customer facing we could design our integration.

For example if the automation(bot) interface is frontend to end customer then in that case flow should be like below;

  1. User send message to Bot interface
  2. Bot start its process and creates a conversation at the same time Freshchat in parallel - using FC API - Create Conversation
  3. For every message sent by customer or by bot , it keeps updating the conversation in FC - Adding message to conversation - Send Message to Conversation
  4. If bot is able to resolve customer query, it resolves the chat and mark is resolved in FC - Update Conversation
  5. Else if query has to be dealt by live agent - Update Conversation Assign to a group or user in FC
  6. Develop a custom app which utilizes Freshchat Product events
  7. In the custom app when agent replies - listen to Message Create Event and use APIs (Your bots API for message response)
  8. For every response from customer keep passing the details to Freshchat using Adding message to conversation - Send Message to Conversation

Hope this helps. Would like to iterate again that based on your use case you might need to design your flow and use Webhooks, APIs and Product events from Freshchat to implement your use case.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the detailed reply, this is very helpful.

Couple more questions;

What if the conversation originates from Apple Business Chat (which is connected and using FreshChat), can a 3rd party automation intercept that chat and respond?

And if so, how and what API would best be used to do that…

I’m gathering we would have to build an App to our Automation Bot that consumes these API’s and set a Webhook to have the ability to this?

Thank you,
Gary

7

Hi Gary,

As mentioned earlier, we need to place APIs, Webhooks and Product event in the flow in case of Apple Chat is the front end. In this case we might have to follow the below;

  1. When a chat is received, in the onConversationCreate Product event in custom App, invoke the bot flow.
  2. From the bot, call Add Message API of FC

This will require some efforts but technically we can do that.

Cheers,
Sachin

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Thank you Sachin, this is really helpful!

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