The blank source is your way to use CloseBot as a standalone resource, adding your own custom channels, utilizing CloseBot chat widgets or our other native channels.
This article shows step-by-step how to add a custom channel. Custom channels can be used to integrate CloseBot with any system that has:
Events posted to your endpoint for any received message
API for sending a message through their platform
Some examples of platforms this has been proven to work for...
Salesforce
Instantly
Twilio
How to Start
Find the custom channel integration option by clicking on your blank source (or creating a new one) within the source list area.
Once you click on the blank source, you will see a channel list. Click on Webhook to get to the webhook connection wizard.
Wizard Setup
The setup has 4 steps. Catching a sample message from your system, mapping received data to required CloseBot fields, telling CloseBot how to send a message and how to pull contact details from the external system (optional).
1. Catch
Start by copying the event endpoint and pasting it into your external application. This tells your external application that it needs to send message received events to CloseBot at this endpoint.
Sometimes you have the ability to customize the outbound event. If you do, you can add the access token requirement. The access token improves security. If enabled, external apps cannot send their own events to this endpoint.
Once you have the endpoint set up, click Start Listening and send a test event from your external application.
2. Message Map
Click Next to see the Message Map. Here you will point at received fields that correspond with fields within CloseBot. Contact ID and message body are required here. Attachments and state are optional.
Contact ID šāāļø ā points to the contact ID within your external app sent with the message
Message āļø ā points to the received message body
Attachments š ā points to any attachments that come with the message
State ā ā any information that you purely want to pass through back to the external application when we respond
3. Message Send
Now that we are receiving inbound message events (step 1), and have mapped those events to fields (step 2), it's time to set up CloseBot's reply.
NOTE: Type @ to display a list of variables that you can use to set up the Message Send
Examine your external app's API to set up the message send. This usually involves a POST request to an endpoint with the contact ID and reply message body.
4. Contact Map (optional)
CloseBot has built in contact fields as well as tag filters. To utilize these, you must complete this Contact Mapping step. This requires you to inform CloseBot how to do a GET contact request and map the returned fields to the default CloseBot fields.
Summary
Upon completion of the above steps, click save. Navigate to your job flows and make sure you have set up your source filters to allow your job flow to reply to your new custom webhook channel!