All channels - Internal Action Steps
Table of Contents
Action steps can be used in the Bot Editor for all available channels like AlcmeonChat, WhatsApp, etc.
Their primary purpose is to execute internal actions within Alcmeon, often related to the customer's last message. These actions include workflow management (like routing to a team, transferring to an advisor, or archiving), saving data to a Custom Field, and many other functionalities.
Most action steps do not send a message to the customer and remain invisible to them.
Action Alcmeon
Editing a Tag
This action allows you to apply a qualifying tag to the customer's latest message or to route their message to a specific team.
To configure this action, select:
- The tag menu to edit, including the "Team" tag.
- The value you set for this tag from the list.
Transfer to an Advisor
This action forwards the customer's most recent message to the advisors' inbox.
This is particularly useful when your bot has already responded to the customer's last message. Without this action, the conversation would typically appear in a "Replied" status, making it less visible or almost invisible to advisors. With this action," the message is prominently displayed in the "Received" section, ensuring it is clearly visible to advisors within the team to which the message was routed.
Assign a Value to a Variable
This action allows you to define a variable and assign it a value. This value is not confined to the customer's last message; a variable represents data permanently associated with a user, not just the current message or conversation. Therefore, it persists across multiple conversations.
The formula used to assign values in this step must conform to the Jinja2 format (refer to: https://palletsprojects.com/p/jinja/)
It's a developer tool, requiring careful handling, designed to enable your bot to "remember" specific information at various points in the scenario, and later be used to:
- Modify the value of a qualification or routing (team)
- Be used in a “Condition on variable” step to create conditional branches in the scenario
- Be stored within a “Custom Field” step
- Serve as input for a subbot step designed for that purpose
Tag with a Variable Value
This action lets you use the value of an already established variable to set the value of a qualification or routing (team) tag on the customer's most recent message.
📄 Note: The label of the tag value must exactly match the variable's value; otherwise an error will occur.
Archive
This action archives the customer's last message. As a reminder, archiving a message in Alcmon means “deciding not to respond”. The message remains accessible in the "Archived" tab in the inbox, but will no longer be presented to advisors for processing.
Custom Event
This action enables you to record a custom event during a scenario. This functionality is crucial for gathering statistics on whether a user has performed this specific action step one or multiple times. These statistics are then accessible on the Analytics / Volumes / Custom Events page.
The unique identifier for a custom event is its label. Therefore, always select a previously created event from the dropdown menu in this step, rather than attempting to create a new one.
Custom events are common to all scenarios and accounts. This means you can gather statistics that span across your entire operation. For example, you could Count how many users select "option 1" for a specific question that appears in multiple scenarios across various channels. Or you could track the number of users who navigate through a particular scenario branch that's shared across different channels.
📄 Note: You can view, edit, delete, or create new custom events on the "Settings / Bot Events" page.
Save the Contents of the message_content Variable
⚠️Advanced feature, please contact Alcmeon support before using it.
This action step is designed to be used in conjunction with a specialized subbot step configured for the "Internal Subbot" / "Capture Message Content" functionality.
Within your scenario, the subbot step is placed first to capture the content of the customer's latest message and save it to the message_content variable. Subsequently, this "Save content to message_content" action step will then save that captured message content into an Excel file.
This feature is currently in its testing phase. The resulting Excel file is not accessible to Alcmeon users. To retrieve the data from this file, Alcmeon's technical team will need to manually extract and transmit it to you.
API Call
This step enables you to connect with external APIs, typically your own. Its primary purpose is to either retrieve information (general or customer-specific) for use within your bot scenario or to send data to your existing IT systems.
This capability unlocks a wide array of high-value use cases, significantly reducing the need for human advisor intervention.
For example,, you can fetch data such as logged-in customer details, loyalty points, the status of their latest order, or their customer account preferences. This data allows you to personalize their bot experience.
Conversely, you can use this step to push data that the customer has provided within the bot scenario (e.g., email, phone number, consent for marketing communications, preferred store, location). This helps complement and enrich existing data in your CRM or other data repositories.
For detailed instructions on using this feature, please refer to: https://developers.Alcmeon.com/docs/how-to-use-api-external-authorization
Custom Field
This step enables you to save a variable or the content of the customer's last message into an already defined custom field.
Before saving, this step verifies that the data format matches the expected type for that custom field. For instance, an integer custom field cannot store an email address.
If the format matches, the variable value or message content will be stored in the custom field, and the step's outcome will be "Success."
Otherwise, the step's outcome will be "Failed."
📄 Note: The “Settings / Custom Fields” page allows you to edit, delete, or create new custom fields. It also allows you to configure how each field appears for advisors in the Conversation Page and Inbox.
Transition with Delay
This step allows you to send a specific branch of your scenario to the customer immediately, and then, after a defined delay, send another distinct branch of the scenario.
This is useful for example, to send an immediate "Thank you for this great day" message, and then 23 hours later send a follow-up message, such as the beginning of a customer satisfaction survey or an interesting new commercial offer, encouraging the customer to re-engage with the conversation.