Learn About the Template Bot: Gather Info from User

The Gather info from user dialog is a shared dialog called from the Connect with Sales and Report an Issue dialog groups to collect key information from the user. The dialog collects the user’s information by asking the user a series of questions and filling variables with the responses.

Note Creating a separate dialog follows the best practice of reusing dialogs wherever possible, instead of repeating the dialog’s components in multiple places in the bot. With this structure, if you want to change how the bot asks the user for their name, simply modify the message in the Get user info dialog.

Both system entities and custom entities are used to capture user responses. The system text entity is used to capture a broad range of inputs and not overly restrict responses. It’s used to capture the user’s first name, last name, and company:

Custom entities help validate user responses before they’re stored in bot variables. If bot variables are used to populate data fields, entities help maintain data quality within Salesforce. For example, a custom email entity is used to capture the user’s email address:

If we take a closer look at the email entity, we see that it uses a regular expression (RegEx) to recognize an email format with an @ sign and domain name:

If the user enters a phrase that doesn’t match the RegEx format, the bot becomes confused and moves to the Confused dialog.

Note To learn more about how the bot processes free text and when the bot moves to the Confused dialog, see Navigating Bot Conversations.

With custom entities, it’s a good idea to use Conversation Repair to correct an input before defaulting to the Confused dialog. Conversation repair can provide the user with specific guidance on how to format a response: