Overview
The Stop Responding action is pretty self-explanatory... it tells your agent to stop responding when it reaches this point in the conversation job flow. By default this doesn't change any tags or properties... it simply stops responding to the contact but continues to listen.
Still Listening
When a contact enters the stop responding node, there are two ways that it could still respond to the contact.
If you have Conversational Rescheduling turned on inside of the Job Flow Settings -> Important Business Information and the contact sends a message like, "Hey! I am stuck in traffic and need to reschedule." The contact will start into our Rescheduling Sequence.
If you have Custom Scenarios set up and the contact says something that would trigger one of your Custom Scenarios.
This gives you a lot of flexibility. Maybe you want CloseBot to book your appointments, but you have a confirmation workflow where you have contacts "Reply Yes" to confirm their appointment. You don't want your agent to respond to that yes, but you still want the agent to be able to cancel or reschedule an appointment if it needs to. This is possible by putting the contact into a Stop Responding action.
Another example: You have disqualified a contact due to no interest but they come back the next day and have changed their mind. They say, "Hey I shopped around and your business offers the most value, could I book a time with you?" In this scenario, you have a Custom Scenario set up to move people to the Booking action if they are interested in booking. The Custom Scenario would pull the contact out the Stop Responding and follow the actions of your Booking Custom Scenario flow.
Stop Responding vs. "ai off"
Stop Responding has a lot more flexibility than "ai off." If there is potential that the lead may be requalified or want to book in the future Stop Responding is the better option.
"ai off" effects the contact on a deeper level because the "ai off" tag(highlevel)/list(hubspot) is, by default, added to every Source Filter's settings to not allow them into the Job Flow. By adding the "ai off" tag/list to a contact, you are restricting their access into all Job Flows within CloseBot. You can think of this as a permanent state that the contact will never talk to any of your agents again as long as that tag/list is present. (Note: you can remove the "ai off" tag in HighLevel or change the value of the cb_ai_off field in HubSpot and give Job Flow entry access back to that contact in your CRM.)
Example Implementation
Maybe we would like the agent to stop responding and tag the contact as not interested if we detect they aren't interested in our product while having a normal Q&A type conversation.
First, let's drag over a conversation action that will allow the agent to stay here and have a conversation with our contact.
Next, let's create a custom scenario that listens for signs that the contact is not interested.
Finally, let's add a tag not interested if this custom scenario is triggered and add a stop responding action to stop the agent from continuing back to the main flow when it's finished with the custom scenario as is default behavior.
Let's take a look at how this agent performs when we initiate a conversation with it and trigger it to go into our custom scenario, which adds the tag and stops responding.
Next Steps
Make sure to check out the Conversation action if you would like your agent to be able to continue answering questions at the end.