Updated
Your chatbot answering your support inbox, with the same knowledge, tools and workflows as on your website.
Before you start, build your chatbot and make it Live under Deploy: it answers only while it is Live. What works in every channel, such as signed-in users, is on the Channels page.
There is nothing to install and no account to create. ChatFrom gives the chatbot an address of its own; you forward your support address to it. The chatbot replies in the same thread, so your customer sees the reply under their own email.
Setting it up
- Under Channels, press Give this chatbot an address. ChatFrom shows an address such as
chat-3f9ac2b1d4e5@inbound.chatfrom.io. - In your mail provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or wherever your domain's mail is), forward
support@yourcompany.comto that address. Keep a copy in your inbox if you want to read along. Gmail asks the destination to confirm a new forwarding rule: that confirmation is passed on to your own inbox, so look for it there and follow its link. - Write to your support address from another account to try it. The answer comes back within a minute, from the chatbot's address.
To stop, press Disconnect and confirm, then remove the forwarding rule. The address stops answering at once. If you connect email again later, the chatbot gets a new address, and your forwarding rule has to follow.
Good to know
- The reply comes from the chatbot's address, not from your support address, in the same thread. A customer who replies writes to the chatbot, and the conversation continues until two weeks pass without a message. Answering under your own address needs your domain verified, which is not built yet.
- Who is writing is checked. Anyone can put any address in an email's From line, so the chatbot treats the sender as that person, with the account they linked, only when the sender's mail provider vouches for the message (DMARC), as Gmail, Outlook and most business mail do. Mail that fails that check is not answered. Other mail is answered as a stranger's, at most three times a day to one address and twenty a day in all, and cannot link an account.
- It answers people, not machines. An out-of-office, an auto-reply, a newsletter or a mailing list is left alone, so two robots can never answer each other.
- Quoted threads and signatures are removed before the chatbot reads a message, so it answers what the person actually wrote.
- A question with options is written out numbered, since email has no buttons. The person replies with the option or its number.
- How each reply is written is yours to set under Channels: the line it opens with, where
{name}becomes the person's first name, and the signature it closes with. Both are optional. - Signed-in users need no command. When your chatbot can act for them, its first answer in a conversation carries a link to your connect page, so the person just clicks it. Writing
connectgets the same link. It is offered only to someone not linked yet, and only on mail their own domain vouches for. Under Channels you choose when it appears: under a conversation's first answer, under every answer until they connect, or never. - One conversation for each person who writes in an email thread, starting again after two weeks without a message, or when they write
new.connectlinks their account,disconnectunlinks it. - Attachments are not read yet. The chatbot answers the text of the message; a message with only an attachment gets a short line asking for text.
- If a reply cannot be sent, the Channels card says so, with Resend's reason. Press the connect button again once it is fixed.