Flows

A flow is a conversation or an automation you draw with blocks: it asks with buttons, decides by the answer, saves data, waits and hands the conversation to a person when needed. Unlike the AI assistant, a flow always does exactly the same thing — and that is its value when the step matters: a confirmation, a piece of data that has to be captured with no room for error, a notice that has to go out on time.

It lives in the menu, under Flows. The list shows each flow with its status (On, Off or Draft), its entry channel, how many people are inside right now (In progress) and when it was last edited.

Three things you can build

1. 1
   A guided chatbot

   A welcome with a menu, a survey, a lead qualification: the flow asks with buttons and follows the answer. It can be what a WhatsApp number answers first with (see below) and hand the conversation to the AI assistant or the team when it makes sense.

2. 2
   An automation that reacts

   Something happens —an appointment is booked, a contact is created, someone adds a tag to a conversation— and the flow starts on its own for that person. The Flow triggers guide covers everything that can start a flow.

3. 3
   A sequence over time

   Reminders, follow-ups, a second notice three days later: the flow waits a length of time or until a saved date and continues. Outside the WhatsApp 24-hour window it writes with an approved template.

You do not have to start from scratch: Templates has seven ready-made flows for the most common cases (see the Flow templates guide).

Four steps, in this order

1. 1
   1 · Draw it

   In the Canvas tab. You add blocks from the Add column —by clicking them or dragging them to the exact spot— and join them with arrows. Every flow starts at Start. While you edit you are working on a draft: nobody is using it.

2. 2
   2 · Test it

   With Test you go through it as if you were the person, over WhatsApp, email, voice or web, without sending anything to anyone and without having to save.

3. 3
   3 · Publish it

   Publish is the only orange button on the screen. If the drawing has problems it stays disabled and tells you how many are left to fix; if there are unsaved changes it asks you to save them first, because what gets published is what is saved.

4. 4
   4 · Turn it on with a trigger

   The On switch in the header. A flow that is on only starts when one of its triggers matches: with no triggers it never starts.

The editor has five tabs: Canvas (the drawing), Triggers (what starts it and how it behaves while it runs), Runs (who is inside and how each one ended), Versions (what was published) and Metrics (how it is doing). Above the canvas, the No problems indicator —or the count of errors and warnings— is checked by the server while you draw: click it to see the list and jump to each block. Errors block publishing; warnings do not.

The header ⋯ menu has Rename and describe, Duplicate, Export JSON, Import JSON and, at the end, Delete flow. A flow with conversations in progress cannot be deleted: turn it off first and wait for them to finish.

Publishing freezes a version

When you publish, what is saved is frozen as a numbered version. A person who was already inside the flow keeps the version they started with, so publishing never changes their path halfway through the conversation. You can keep editing the draft without touching what is running, and the vN live · edited pill next to the flow name reminds you (hover it for the full sentence).

There are two different states: unsaved means what you see on the canvas is not saved yet —the bar at the bottom offers Save (also Ctrl+S) and Discard, and the portal asks before letting you leave by any path, also from the side menu or a link— and unpublished means what is saved is not what is running yet. The second one is calm: your work is already safe.

In Versions you see each version with who published it, when and how many runs started with it. Compare shows, against the saved draft, which blocks change, which you would get back and which you would remove, marked on each side’s drawing (green, added; amber, changed; red, removed, with its legend); Restore to draft copies that version into the draft. Restoring does not publish: what runs only changes when you publish again.

Test it without anyone finding out

Test opens the test conversation next to the canvas. It goes through what is drawn, even if you have not saved it, with the same engine the platform really uses. It sends no messages, adds no tags and hands the conversation to nobody: nobody on the other side finds out. The start runs on its own when you open it.

1. 1
   Choose how it would arrive

   At the top you choose WhatsApp, Email, Voice or Web. It is the same test seen through another channel: on WhatsApp, up to 3 options go out as buttons and 4 to 10 as a list the person opens; on voice, the agent reads them. Whatever that channel cannot do shows up at the top, under What changes through ….

2. 2
   Reply as the person

   Click one of the options the flow just offered —on WhatsApp and the web, the button on the preview phone itself— or type in Write as the person…. A typed answer that matches no option goes out through “other reply”.

3. 3
   Make happen what does not depend on the person

   Let time pass jumps to when whatever the flow is waiting for expires, so a two-day wait is tested in one click. Make something fail simulates that a step could not be done, which is the only way to go down an “on failure” exit. When the flow hands the conversation to the assistant, you choose the branch it comes back through.

4. 4
   Test with a contact

   Under the hood has the Test contact: fill in contacto_nombre, the email or the tags and click Test with this contact to see the flow as that person would get it. ahora_fecha, ahora_hora and horario_habil come from your business clock, as in a real run; type them to test another moment (for example, horario_habil set to no to see the after-hours path). Right there you see the engine steps and the variables the flow collects.

The blocks the test went through are numbered on the canvas, in order, and the arrows each one left through are highlighted. If you give a signal the flow is not waiting for —you write while it waits for the clock, for example— the step is marked and tells you what it expected and what arrived: with a real person, the flow would stay there.

While the flow runs, who replies?

A conversation has one flow at a time, and the flow lives alongside the AI assistant like this:

• While the flow waits for a reply (an open question), the message belongs to the flow: the assistant does not reply. That is the question’s job.
• While the flow waits for time or an event, it depends on If the person writes during a wait, in the Triggers tab: with The assistant replies (what every new flow comes with) the assistant answers whatever the person writes and the flow keeps waiting; with The flow stays quiet, nobody replies and the messages stay in the inbox.
• In the Assistant block, the flow hands the conversation to the AI assistant for one turn and continues depending on how it ends.
• If someone on the team took the conversation, the flow does not start on it, and a flow that assigns the conversation to someone ends there.
• When it ends, the conversation goes back to whoever was handling it before. Ending does not close it: that is what the Close the conversation block is for.

Words to leave the flow

In Triggers → Words to leave the flow you define groups of words that take the person out of the flow at any moment, for example “agent” or “human”. Each group says What happens next: Leave the flow (the conversation goes back to whoever was handling it) or Leave and hand over (to the team queue, the assistant or a person). The whole word has to match, regardless of accents or capital letters: “agent” matches “I want an agent”, but not “agency”.

A new flow starts with no words to leave: if you want someone to be able to ask for a person in the middle of a menu, add them. Up to 20 groups per flow, with up to 20 words each.

The same section has the Entry channel: where people come in (WhatsApp, Email, Voice, Web chat or Any channel). Today the blocks that write to the person only go out through WhatsApp; if the entry channel cannot write, the flow cannot be published and tells you why.

A WhatsApp number answered by a flow

In WhatsApp, each number has Answers first: AI assistant or A flow. With A flow you choose a published one in Flow in charge, and from then on every new conversation —or one that reopens— on that number starts in that flow without looking at its triggers.

• If the flow reaches Assistant, the AI assistant replies; if it reaches Assign, it goes to a person on the team.
• At End, the conversation goes back to the number’s assistant, or to the team queue if the number has none.
• If someone on the team is already handling the conversation, the flow stays out of it.
• If the chosen flow is turned off, unpublished or deleted, the number keeps answering with the assistant and the screen tells you: it is never left silent.

Flows in the inbox

When a conversation is inside a flow, Contact information says so at the top: In the flow “…”, what it is doing (Waiting for their reply until …, Paused until …, The assistant is replying inside the flow) and View to open its run. If it got stuck, it says that too.

In the conversation’s More options menu, whoever has permission to operate flows finds Start a flow… (starts a flow on that conversation now) or, if it is already in one, Remove from the flow in its place (cancels the run; whatever the flow already sent stays in the thread and the conversation goes back to whoever had it). For a flow to show up in Start a flow… it has to be published, on, and have the By hand, from the inbox trigger turned on.

Edit quickly

• Save (Ctrl+S): saves the draft, also with the cursor in a field.
• Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z): up to 50 steps, and what you type in a row in the same field counts as one.
• Copy, paste and duplicate (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+D): pasted blocks keep the arrows between them, also when you paste them into another flow. Start is never copied or deleted.
• Select several: Ctrl + click adds or removes a block, Shift + drag selects everything in an area and Ctrl+A selects all. A bar appears with Duplicate, Align in a row, Align in a column, Arrange the selection and Delete.
• Tidy up lays the whole drawing out in columns by how far each block is from the start. It does not save: if you do not like it, discard the changes.
• Connect without hitting the dot: drop the arrow on an empty spot of the canvas and choose the new block, which appears there already connected. Or select the block and, under Outputs, each unconnected output offers Connect to… (a block that already exists) and + (a new block), also from the keyboard.
• Zoom: the canvas opens on Start, at a size you can read; the percentage is in the bar. If you zoom far out, each block shows only its name, large.
• Search the canvas (Ctrl+F) by name, type or text, and ? opens the shortcut sheet.
• On a small screen the canvas is read-only: tap a block to see or change its settings. To add, move or connect blocks, use a bigger screen.

What it does not do yet

These blocks and triggers come in a later stage. Until then they are not in the palette or, if they are, they say so:

• Other channels: sending an email, calling the person by voice and waiting for the call’s result, adding them to a campaign and booking an appointment from the flow.
• AI inside the flow: classifying an answer, extracting data from a text or drafting a message.
• Calling another system with an HTTP request and saving what it returns (today there is Send to a webhook, which notifies but does not read a reply).
• Flows in the website web chat: the test already shows you how it would read, but the site chat does not run flows yet.
• The At a set time and When a contact field changes triggers show up in the list disabled: they can’t be added yet.
• The Business hours block follows the service’s business hours; you cannot load your own per organization yet, or holidays.