Sometimes you're testing your dialogues and wondering why you seem to not go down the appropriate branch. To determine what the issue might be there are a few things to check - in this article, we will cover our standard troubleshooting logic.
Conversation Logs
The very first thing to check when understanding why a conversation is not progressing as you might expect is to review the Conversation Logs
Depending on the issue there are a few things to check.
Confidence_score
When it comes to Intent prediction confidence score is the most important component. From the message you want to validate - click on the slider icon on the right of the message. This will open up the expression overview for you to see what the presumed intent was, how confident it was that it was that intent and whether it has been trained as an expression for that Intent. Based on the % and the threshold you have set on bot Settings level for confidence thresholds will indicate why an intent wasn't triggered.
Confidence Never Exceeds Confidence Threshold for Default Messages
If all messages trigger the default reply - and the confidence is consistently low, this is a training issue. Revisit Content Coverage Analysis Explained and Confidence Thresholds Explained.
Reply not Triggered
Check that the reply is active by navigating to the Intent table - active replies are green.
Ensure there is only 1 reply per language.
To manage replies, click on the Intent name and the reply. From here you can check the active box or delete the unnecessary reply.
Conversation & Session Details
The conversation details enable you to see which actions were performed and the parameters set (conversation or action based). To determine why certain things happened, this is a good way to check what happened on the conversation level to then drill into how this could have occurred.
Conditional Blocks
Operators
Conditional blocks can have two issues when it comes to operators - having the incorrect operator (for example includes instead of in) or the operator you are expecting is set as the wrong value (string vs array).
Parameter Collection
When filtering based on a parameter it is important to ensure that it was actually collected and saved in the conversation branches.
The most common issue is a typo.
Check the saved parameters and ensure they exist, haven't been unset, and are written exactly the same.
Visitor Messages
Order of scenarios
Scenarios are prioritized from left to right - and thus the most likely and least-sensitive should be the left-most scenario.
When asking for text input, free-text written should be the right-most scenario as it will catch any and all text input, so entities and intents that you are looking for would be captured within that net of free-text written, so instead should have entities and then intents in the right-most positions.
Entity Recognised vs Intent Predicted
Sometimes instead of creating intents for affirmative or negation, content entity lists can be created, which although allows you to add a list of all options you can think of, is not multi-lingual out of the box and doesn't factor in for typos, it is just looking for exact matches. This also means if someone says "yeah, thanks for the suggestion but I don't want to do that", it would be caught as affirmative, when the sentiment of the whole sentence is no.
Technical Error - Characters or Mixed Buttons and Links
If you see a technical error message first, check if your internet connection is stable. If it all seems normal to you, then troubleshoot by checking the following:
- button length exceeds the 20-character limit
-
dialogue contains buttons mixed with external links
This is specific to Zendesk clients only. The Zendesk widget only supports buttons with less than 20 characters. The error message appears when there is/are button(s) exceeding the 20-character limit.
To find out which button is causing this error message:
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- Go to Conversation Logs from the left side menu.
- Go to the conversation that encountered the error message
- Go to the bot message before the error message
- Click on the settings icon of the bot message
- A reply overview will open where you can easily navigate to the dialogue that caused the error message.
- Check the buttons' character length and adjust to no more than 20 characters per button.
- Check the buttons' type and change them all to be either buttons or external link buttons.
- Click Save before exiting the dialogue
Carousels
Each CRM has its own limitation when it comes to carousels, typically issues arise when character or button limits are exceeded or fields are left entirely blank (a lone empty space does not count as a character).
Availability Blocks
Under the Team Availability option, the correct transfer department, button ID, or group ID hasn't been written as an exact match.
How to identify - Lots of failed escalation errors.
If there are no escalations taking place within the standard operating window when humans are online, this would symbolize something is wrong with this block and they aren't being diverted, or something is wrong with the CRM integration - check out the CRM troubleshooting article here.
Escalation Blocks
The escalation blocks typically only have issues that relate to not including the correct department or when doing custom escalations, forgetting to add any actions.