The Variable Delay action tells your agent that it should wait at this point in the job flow until a source variable is not blank. You can choose to have it wait in place without responding back at all during this time or allow it to respond without continuing until the field it's watching is no longer blank.

This option lets you choose whether you want to allow your agent to continue responding while waiting for the source variable to get a value. An example would be telling a contact that you are generating a quote, and allowing the agent to continue to answer the contact's questions until it's done. You could do this if you have some kind of automation on your end calculating something and inputting the value into a source field that you need your agent to be able to reference at the next step.

Let's imagine I want to gather some information for a cleaning company (address and type of interior cleaning requested) and update fields on my connected source. Updating those fields will trigger an automation external from CloseBot that does a calculation and updates a field. We want to wait for our external automation to complete so we can use the value of that field to give our quote for the work.

First, let's collect that initial information that will be used to generate our external quote. We add an objective to collect an address and the contact's desired type of interior cleaning.

Once we have these pieces of information, we can tell the contact that we are looking into things and generating a quote for them. We would do this with a statement action. Let's use the power of AI so it works our statement naturally into the conversation instead of saying what we type exactly. We are moving on without response from the contact so we immediately go into the next action, the variable delay.

Now it's time to wait and continue to answer back and forth until the quote is done. Do this with our variable delay action.

Once complete, we can use another statement objective to give them the quote 🥳

We won't be able to test this adequately in our test portal since test contacts don't have fields we can update, but we could test it with a contact in our source.

It's the simple actions like this that give you extreme flexibility to build expert-level agents. Try using the variable 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.