Each week we highlight new articles and changes to the platform, as well as tips intended to help you get the most out of TextIt:
Updates
- Last week, Facebook launched the Messenger Platform (beta), a platform that allows developers to build interactive chat bots to communicate with over 900 million monthly Facebook Messenger users on behalf of any Facebook Page (the promotional kind). This week, we released a Facebook Messenger channel that will allow you to leverage TextIt’s visual, drag-and-drop interface to build and deploy your own Messenger bot. Each bot will map to a TextIt account. Build just one bot, and your experience is available on all platforms where Messenger exists, including iOS, Android, and the web. Use this guide to submit a Messenger app for review and connect it to your TextIt account (link).
- A single account may now contain channels in different countries. How this effects channel-contact behavior: If not yet contacted, TextIt will assign channels to contacts based on their country. Once a contact has responded to a channel, they'll continue to receive messages from that channel unless they send a message to a different channel, in which case they'll become tied to the new channel.
Tips
- To link contact fields to flow results, simply add contact fields to your flow results export. If you'd like to display results via your own dashboard, checkout TextIt's API, which will allows you to externally display contact fields, flow results and more.
- Those interested in visualizing a certain type of response (like the categories through which each contact passes in a flow) should consider updating them to contact fields once they've been evaluated by a RuleSet, then executing a contact export. This allows you to (a) ensure the correct values are assigned to your contacts' fields, and (b) skip the process of pulling specific columns out of a flow results export. Note that response categories can be called using the '.category' extension, e.g. @flow.response_1.category. More on TextIt variables here.
- You can determine a contact's group membership within a flow using a 'Split by Contact Field' RuleSet that evaluates the 'Groups' contact field:
- If your application solicits and updates contact information to specific contact fields (like a registration form or the like), you may want to search for contacts missing a value in specific fields. You can do so via the search bar in the contacts tab: simply enter the query contact_field="", where 'contact_field' is the name of the field you're searching. For example, if we want to look for contacts who haven't yet provided their gender, we can use the query gender="".
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