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Design Texting Sequences using Schedule Patterns

Scheduling is only available in Enterprise plans.

Suppose you want to periodically activate a chatbot on a user’s Messenger or phone (SMS). For that, you could create bot welcomeBot that asks a user if she want to subscribe to the periodic bot wellnessBot. You need to first create a Schedule Pattern and then assign it to user(s). Here are the steps.

Create Schedule Pattern

STEP 1

Go to the CHATBOTS page to create a bot, for example named wellnessBot, which could for example remind the user to walk 100 steps, or ask the user how many hours they slept.

step 2

Go to AUTOMATION and then to the Schedule Pattern tab. There, create a Schedule Pattern for the wellnessBot, which specifies that this chatbot should be activated once a day at 9 am (preferred time) on Messenger page https://www.messenger.com/t/551011855343268 (or on a Twilio phone number), as follows:

Note that the Medium ID is the Facebook page or the Twilio phone number from where the messages will be sent.

Set Activation Delay to 0 if you want the schedule to go in effect right away.

You can also use Schedule Patterns for non-recurrent activations. For example, if you wanted the wellnessBot to only execute once, you can set Recurrence to once.

Assign Schedule Pattern to User(s)

There are several ways to do that. You can have a separate chatbot assign the schedules, or assign them manually through the Management Dashboard.

Have a chatbot automatically assign Schedule Pattern to User

Continuing the above example, we need to create a bot that will assign users to the wellnessBotDemo Schedule Pattern created above.

Go to CHATBOTS page and create bot welcomeBot, which will assign a user to the wellnessBotDemo pattern created above when the user agrees to subscribe, as shown below.

assign Schedule Pattern Manually: First Way

Consider the use case where you have a new food ordering service and you created a chatbot called FoodOrderingBot to explain the features of this service. Suppose you want to activate this bot for 10 of your users immediately. (That is, you want to push the bot to the users, in contrast to the above example where the users pull the bot by explicitly enrolling using the welcomeBot bot.)

For that, you can create a Schedule Pattern as below:

And then click on Schedule Chatbot right below to select the users where you want to activate this chatbot as shown below.

assign Schedule Pattern Manually: second Way

While chatting with a user in CHATS, you may decide to schedule a bot for her. For example, the use may ask to enroll to your wellness chatbot program. For that simply click on Add Schedule as shown below and select a Schedule Pattern.