On Monday, a customer came to us with an interesting problem. They were attending this year’s AWS re:invent virtual event as one of the sponsors. As a sponsor, AWS provides them with chat functionality for their virtual booth. The problem is that the chat software needs someone to continuously be logged in to monitor any new requests. With re:invent running for 3 weeks with sessions 24hours a day 5 days a week, you can imagine this was a challenge to the staff!
They had to figure out how to staff the chat and scheduled the whole sales and marketing team to monitor it. They reached out to PandaFlow to see if we could adapt our existing Slack integration to build a bot that monitored the chat 24x7 and instantly notified a Slack channel of a new chat request.
In just a few hours our team was able to hack together a quick chatbot monitoring workflow that performs the monitoring without anyone having to be logged in. While there are a few "hacky" steps, the Panda Bot Chat Attendant enables you and your team to monitor re:invent chat from the comfort of your own Slack channel, phone number or email list - without you or your team having to be logged into the chat portal continuously. This allows your team members to continue to instantly respond to prospective customers without having to constantly monitor a random browser window.
“Having created more complicated workflows with PandaFlow in the past, I was hoping that they could pull off a custom integration quickly, and sure enough they delivered,” said Daniel Lizio-Katzen, head of strategy and partnerships for Weaveworks. “Even though this monitoring bot seems pretty basic, it is a huge time saver for our team as anyone in our Slack channel will now be notified when a visitor’s chat comes in.”
The idea was simple, we created a simple bot and added it to PandaFlow as a workflow that mimicked a headless Chrome browser that would log-in to the chat moderator admin portal and check if there was a new chat in a loop. If it found a new chat it would simply notify a Slack channel. We had that working in a few hours.
If you’re currently staffing your virtual booth at re:invent and would like to enable the same functionality. Please visit this page and sign up and then follow the below instructions.
Thanks for reading this far, we hope you find this integration useful - if you have more complicated integrations that are causing a lot of manual work for your sales, marketing and/or finance teams, please don’t hesitate to connect with us here to learn about how PandaFlow can help.
How to get it Setup with Pandaflow
1. Sign up on pandaflow.io
2. Connect Slack by going to Connectors
3. Add a workflow
Click on this link to create a workflow
You may receive a warning that PandaFlow is not a certified Slack app - and while this is true, you can rest assured that we take security seriously and will never post anything except for new chat notifications to your selected Slack channel (if you’re concerned about this, you can also use the send to email functionality).
4. Add your chat moderator details
Make a copy of this Google Sheet template and plug in your email address and passwords and the webbook address
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13FGX8uO8LWv5zeH-MyI9H__gG7AEgy4gdMgVrbRDs1M/edit#gid=0
(Make sure to create a copy before entering the details) - this part is tricky
Moderator email : Your AWS Chat moderator email account. You should create a new account to be used by the bot so that it doesn't logout the other user.
Password: Password for that account
Webhook : Copy it from the first step in the workflow
5. Set the channel for notifications
