April 6, 2020 Major Release

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We hope you, family, and colleagues are healthy and safe during this time of crisis and uncertainty. We're here for you if we can be of any help or support. We wish you all the best and are hopeful that this situation will play itself through in short order so we can all get back to leading normal lives. The Chatbox team is working remotely and is continuing to iterate and build. Phil Gordon, CEO / Founder

This is a major release of the Chatbox platform. We have made significant improvements to the Contact Actions interface and workflow. We have added to our analytics offering and also added more granular permissions to the Agent interface.

Contacts

Channels

Automations

Contact Actions

We have improved the ability to determine that status of a Contact Action from the main list view page. This will allow the basics metrics of a Contact Action to be available without having to click in to each individual Action.

Hovering over a detail bar will show the legend and breakdown of stats. Clicking on a row will enter the detailed view for that Contact Action. This screen and the associated stats updates automatically every minute or so.

We have also improved the details view for each individual Contact Action. We now have a status bar that is persisted across the top of each Contact Action. The Overview section also is utilizing real estate more efficiently and showing more pertinent data. The current state (completed, in progress, paused) are more prominently displayed along with their relevant options (pause, resume, cancel).

Contact Action Overview

Contact Action Metrics

We have also significantly improved the Metrics section. We now present metrics in a "funnel" view where each category is broken down along with relative percentages. It is much easier to determine to determine the status of the Contact Action and to easily filter down to the items you are interested in. This screen will update every minute or so.

Paused State

There is now an option to create a Contact Action in a paused state. For Contact Actions that are for A2P processing (opt-in lists), this option allows you to configure your Contact Action and get everything dialed in before "resuming" and kicking it off.

Instant Apps

Input Elements - Auto Save

For Instant App Input elements (Single Line, MultiLine, and Rich Text) there is now an option in the Validation section to automatically save the input when the minimum text length setting has been satisfied.

Agent Tools

In addition to making some overall performance improvements to the Agent Tools interface, we have also added an extensive set of granular permissions. These permissions will allow an Admin to strip down the amount of functionality that an Agent can perform/access in the system. This is mainly to enable use cases where volunteers will be serving in an Agent capacity and the desire is to limit the amount of data and functionality they have access to.

Restricted Chat Mode

You can access the new permissions in the existing permission section. Every potential function for an agent now has a separate permission.

Analytics

We have added to our Analytics offering with this release. A new KPI report is now available to give you a more rolled up look at how your org is performing on the Chatbox Platform. We have also included a Contact Action Report to give you more details around your sends to a list of Contacts.

KPI Report

This report lists overall statistics for a specified time period. There are many new stats here, including segment counts, api error and console errors. Note that segment count, api error count, and console error count is not retroactive and will only reflect activity post-release.

Contact Action Report

Integrations

We have enhanced our integration with NationBuilder. The Chatbox Platform now has the ability to edit NationBuilder lists from within Chatbox. We have also addressed a latent bug that was causing the platform to fail to update NationBuilder with inbound messages.

Infrastructure

We are always working to improve our Platform and its ability to meet the needs of our customers. This release we have implemented functionality for the Platform to maintain a good state of health even when under heavy load. It will auto rate limit some of its functions if the Platform starts to approach a state deemed unhealthy. During these periods of heavy load, message delivery for Contact Actions may be slightly slower than the maximum throughput allowed by the message network operator.