The Time Delay action tells your agent that it should wait at this point in the job flow. You can choose to have it wait in place for a set period of time without responding back at all or allow it to respond without continuing until the time expires.

This option lets you choose whether you want to allow your agent to continue responding while waiting for the time to pass. An example would be telling a contact that you are generating a quote that takes 5 minutes, and allowing the agent to continue to answer the contact's questions until it's "done".

With this disabled, the agent would not respond at all while waiting for the time to pass until it continues to the next action after. An example of when to use this would be if you want to tell the contact, "Wait a moment while I go talk to my boss about that".

Let's imagine we've qualified a lead and now we want to generate some "drama" around whether or not they will be accepted into our program. We will start by sending them a statement, confirming we have received their application. Learn more about statement actions HERE.

Next, we will add a delay action that does not allow the agent to respond until after the allotted time has passed. Sixty seconds in this case.

Finally, we will let them know that they were accepted to the program! 🎉

Let's click the Test button at the bottom to see how this agent performs in its new role.

If we look at the fields that Delay (Time) has, we will see (for a number of seconds) we can (continue responding) while keeping in mind the Extra Prompt to guide the conversation.
​
So what if for 180 seconds (3 minutes) we continue responding to a contact, while following the extra prompt "Overcome any objections the contact may have using information you have access to, and if it seems appropriate suggest they book a meeting."

Utilized with a Custom Scenario or a Branch Type action, the AI can overcome objections and guide someone back towards booking a meeting!

It's the simple actions like this that give you extreme flexibility to build expert-level agents. Try using the time delay action and let us know use cases you've found in our Facebook Community 👏 Other users love to see ideas on how to use CloseBot actions.