What’s New: Improved Chatbots, Template Messages and More

After discovering, developing and testing, you can now access a bunch of new features and improvements.

As always, we’d like to show you what’s changed in detail.

  1. Website Messenger
  2. Message Center
  3. WhatsApp message templates
  4. Chatbots
  5. Dashboard
  6. Userlike & Lime

1
Website Messenger

Proactive mode

The proactive mode got a makeover. If an operator is available, an additional chat bubble will appear above the chat button and welcome bubble.

a proactive chat bubble

Your customers can quickly send their reply directly without having to open the Website Messenger.

This serves as a more engaging, personal nudge to invite your customers to start a conversation.

Conversation history

The option to close the Website Messenger has been moved to the menu in the conversation list and renamed from “Close messenger” to "Clear history."

two Userlike Website Messengers

This makes it more clear to the user what this action does, which is logging them out of the chat and deleting all previous conversations.

Emoji

More emoji are available now! They’re grouped and searchable so you can always find the perfect emoji for every situation. :)

type input showing emoji

2
Message Center

Operators

Operator lists are now displayed in alphabetical order, for example, when you’re looking to forward a conversation to a colleague or assign it under "All Conversations."

In addition, we’ve optimized the loading speed so you can carry out actions in the Message Center much faster.

Live translation

Guten Tag, bună ziua and hej! Userlike now "speaks" 24 languages.

screenshot of the live translation feature in the Userlike Message Center
Enable the live translation and instantly speak your customer’s language.

With our live translation feature ( available from the Corporate plan ), you can support your international customers in the following languages:

Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

3
WhatsApp message templates

To answer a WhatsApp request after the 24-hour service window, you need to use an officially approved message template .

You could already add templates in your Channel settings. But now you can create multiple templates and select which one you want to send to your WhatsApp contact.

screenshot of the WhatsApp message template selection in Userlike

To add, edit or delete templates, go to Channels > Messaging apps, open your WhatsApp channel settings and switch to the Message templates tab.

screenshot of the WhatsApp template message settings in the Userlike Dashboard
You can find your message templates in a separate tab in your Channel settings.

What’s more, you can now also insert placeholders into your message templates to make the interaction more personal, for example, include the contact’s name or customer ID.

You can change the placeholder type later on. However, that’s not the case for your message so make sure that it contains all the placeholders you wish to use and that they’re placed correctly.

Learn more about using the WhatsApp Channel in our tutorial .

4
Chatbots

Media

Bots now support various media formats, such as images and videos. Instead of sending media files via a link – which made our robotic friends look too much like, well, robots – they’re now displayed directly in the Website Messenger, just like it works with your human operators.

Buttons

In addition to "bubbles", "carousels" or simple text messages, a chatbot can also display "buttons" now. Let’s revisit these different options quickly.

chatbot conversations in three Website Messengers
Your chatbot response options for an improved customer experience.
  1. Bubbles allow the contact to select an action from multiple options.

    This is useful if you want to guide your customer closely along a determined conversation path, giving them a predefined set of options.
  2. Carousels also allow you to give your customer a variety of clickable options. Instead of only presenting bubbles, however, you can add an image, headline and description to each one.

    This is the right choice if you want to provide more information, for example, to highlight different products.
  3. Buttons are hyperlinks, disguised as bubbles. So instead of sending a long URL, it’ll be wrapped up nicely into a button option that your customer can click. Although buttons and bubbles look identical, they follow a different logic.

    Buttons make for a beautiful customer experience when sending links. For example, you could use the button "Book an appointment" to guide your contact to a URL with your calendar.

Forward fallback

Decide what should happen when your customer should be forwarded to a human operator but no one is online. Prevent the forward action from failing by setting a fallback.

This is an additional option you can define when writing your own bot in UBL or are using the chatbot API. Before, the bot would forward the conversation to the specified group regardless of their availability. If no one was online at that time, the conversation would go to “Unassigned.”

Now you can trigger a different flow in case no one is available to answer live. For example, you could offer your customers to send you a message via WhatsApp or provide links to other resources, such as your help section or tutorials.

More tweaks

If your contact selects a bubble or carousel, the entire content of the clicked element will now be reflected instead of index numbers only. This makes it easier for you to track the user’s behavior when interacting with your chatbot.

We also optimized the validation of Userlike Bot Language (UBL) scripts so you’ll receive fewer and more targeted error messages.

5
Dashboard

System fonts

If you don’t want to choose your own font, you can activate the system fonts now in the Widget Editor.

System fonts offer the advantage that they do not need to be loaded from your server or ours, which increases the overall chat performance even further.

Widget preview

We’ve improved the widget preview so you can see your changes instantly when you’re adjusting your design.

Message channels

With Userlike, you can get access to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Threema, Telegram and SMS.

screenshot of the messaging apps settings in the Userlike Dashboard
Your channels are now organized in tabs.

Under “Channels”, we’ve split the different messaging apps up into tabs. This helps you keep a better overview of your channels and will load the site faster.

Performance

Loading sites in the Dashboard could sometimes take a while, especially when you had a large setup. We’ve boosted our performance so carrying out actions such as loading your widget overview is now significantly faster.

6
Userlike & Lime

In other news, Userlike has joined Lime Technologies , a leading CRM solution from Sweden. This event marks one of the biggest milestones in our 10-year existence.

As our customer, you won’t experience any changes. We summed up our reasons for the acquisition and answers to common questions in this post .

photo of the Userlike founding team and Lime’s former and new CEO in Lund, Sweden
The Userlike founding team and Lime’s former and new CEO in Lund, Sweden.

That’s it for this time. Reach out to us through the chat on our website or on WhatsApp , if you have any questions. We’re always glad to help. Happy chatting!