The Fallback is essential to a working chatbot. It is what happens when the chatbot doesn’t understand, which can happen sometimes — even with the amazing Clustaar NLP 🙂
In this article, we will explain to you the different levels of Fallbacks in the Clustaar platform, and how to create and use them.
There are three levels of Fallbacks:
- The General Fallback Message
- The Story Fallback
- The Step Fallback
1. The General Fallback
This is the classic Fallback. It will answer when you are not in the middle of a Story.
You create it like a Story, and it can be composed of several Steps.
2. The Story Fallback
If your user is in a Story and you don’t want him or her to get out of it (or if the chatbot does not understand something), you can set a specific Fallback for the Story.
It is created like a Step.
3. The Step Fallback
To complete the three levels of a Fallback, we have added a Fallback at the Step level. This allows you to make sure the user gives the information you need at a given moment. For example, if you need an email address to go forward with a scenario and the user doesn’t give it, your chatbot will be able to politely ask again (or not) — you decide 🙂
You can set it in the “Then…” section at the bottom of your Step, and create it like a step with drag and drop actions.
Chatbot Flexibility
Sometimes you may need the chatbot to get out of the Step if the user’s response does not match anything you had imagined. We have added a button so you can allow the chatbot to match other Intents outside the current Story (or not) — you decide.
If you drag&drop the Text action the “Fallback max attempts” placeholder will appear, set it as you like. It gives you the possibility to decide how many times you want your fallback message to appear.
