Flows introduction

Michelli Silva Updated by Michelli Silva

What is a flow?

A flow is a set of steps organized in a flowchart format. These steps are applied to your contacts when they enter the stream, that is, when they start a conversation.

In flows, these steps can be actions or decisions, which allow the creation and development of conversations from there. In this article, we will talk a little more about the anatomy and structure of these flows.

Flow Anatomy

Anatomy of flows

In the image above, we have an example of a flow for a simple search. In it, we can see decision letters, action letters, and comment letters that together form the structure for the following conversation: send a question, which needs to be answered with yes or no, and from that we will have an answer for each option.

Action cards

Action cards represent some operations / actions that we were able to do within a conversation. Some of these commands are:

  • Send a message to the contact;
  • Mark a message from the contact;
  • Manage contacts in groups;
  • Start other flows;
  • Edit contact information;

That is, the action cards trigger commands that are executed immediately, following a stack order. *

* First in the order of cards, will always be the first to be executed.

Decision Cards

The decision cards are responsible for the most diverse connections during the flow. They are responsible for creating the decision conditions that allow our conversations to take different paths, depending on the data provided by the contact.

Some ways to create decisions are:

  • The contact's response to a question;
  • A group that the contact belongs to;
  • Some contact information;
  • Some result created in the flow;

These decisions are made on the basis of decision rules in the letter, which can be:

  • Check for the existence of specific words in an answer / value;
  • Check for the existence of specific phrases in an answer / value;
  • Check for the existence of specific numbers or numerical rules in an answer / value;
  • Check for the existence of a specific format (such as date, e-mails, phones) in a response / value;

Cards for comments

Comment cards allow you to create notes, similar to post-its, in our flows. Which can be used as a means of communication between you and a colleague who is also working on the same project, either to explain about how part of the flow works, or to alert you that it might be better not to change that step.

To create a comment card, simply double-click an empty spot in the stream. After that, you can move your notes freely and position it where you like best.

What's next?

Now that we know the concept of flow better and understand how it is formed, we can go deeper into each of the cards that exist, in addition to some other settings within our editor.

How did we do?

Flows Creation

Flow editor and tools

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