Platform Release

Year of the 🐷 - January Release

Iaroslav Kudritskiy
January 9, 2019

Hello everyone. 👋 Greetings from Hong Kong. We’re back from the holidays and we’ve finally gotten over our New Years hangovers. What better way to celebrate the year of the 🐷 than with another release? This one is focused on contact segmentation, notifications, and increasing the number of channels that we offer.

Here is a comprehensive list of changes for this version:

  • Contacts Module rebuilt from scratch with exciting new features
  • Settings Module rebuilt to match the new design
  • Space creation process has been simplified
  • Notifications Center and Email Notifications implemented
  • New Channel: Twitter
  • New Channel: Telegram
  • New Channel: Kik
  • New Channel: Viber
  • New Channel: Line
  • Log in with Google implemented
  • Configurable greeting messages for channels added

If you’d like to see release notes from our previous versions you can check them out here.

Contacts Module

The biggest change in this release is a brand new Contacts Module. Believe it or not, our platform has been using the same Contacts Module since our very first release. The entire team agreed that it was time to put it out to pasture. The rebuilt Contact Module was designed to fulfil two major goals:

  • Realign the contact module with the rest of the platform
  • Enable granular contact segmentation
The Contacts Module Segment Dropdown
Contacts Module Segment Viewer

One of the features we created to enable our users to build granular segments is a drop down segment viewer. After all, how can you build and optimise your segments if you can’t study and analyse them? Any segments you create will be viewable in the segment viewer. We’ve also created a default set of segments that closely match the options available in the Messaging Module. These are designed to give a quick overview of the contacts that are talking to your operators and their associated properties.

Contacts Module Column Picker
Contacts Module Column Picker

To make analysing contacts easier and more powerful we’ve added the ability to customise the columns you see in the Contacts Module. Clicking the action menu on the top right will display any of your contacts properties in your table and compare your data across contacts. If you’d like to see additional information like phone number, email, tags or the custom columns that you’ve created, you’ll now be able to do that.

Contacts Module Filter / Segment Creator
Contacts Module Filter Side Bar

Now that you’re able to view your segments you’re also going to need a way to build them. We’ve created a filtering sidebar that allows you to explore using the various properties of your contacts. Once you’re happy with your filtering selection, simply save the selection as a segment.

Filters allow you to explore your contacts based on several properties such as channel, gender, and locale. These are all relatively static properties which allow the creation of static segments. Other properties are what get us really excited though - Status, Assignee, Tags, Last Message & Date Added are all relatively dynamic properties. Together these properties will allow you to build segments that take into account a contacts current situation. These properties enable the creation of dynamic segments. These dynamic segments are the foundation of exciting upcoming releases. The first is going to be an implementation of segments in Broadcasts, but dynamic Segments have an even bigger role to play in an upcoming secret project.

Contacts Module Details Side Bar
Contacts Module Details Side Bar

Last but certainly not least we’ve made the details pane editable and to match the design of other elements it’s now become a sidebar. Now you’ll be able to edit all your contact parameters in the Contacts Module just like you can in the Messaging Module.

Notifications

Rocketbots Notifications Center
Notification Center

Notifications have been the single biggest request from our current users. We’ve worked with quite a few of them to understand their use cases and release a set of notifications and preferences that are both simple to use but robust enough to be functional. In this release, we have provided three distinct notifications that will display in the Notification Centre or be sent to you as an email:

  • Unread messages from unassigned contacts
  • Unread messages from contacts assigned to you
  • Someone has been assigned to you

Email notifications are designed to alert you when you are away from the platform so they will only be sent when you’ve haven’t been active in the platform for over 30 seconds. We think this setup is especially useful in a single person operation.

Notification Preferences
Notification Preferences

To allow you to tailor your Notifications setup for a multi-user operation, we’ve provided two controls tailor notifications to your preferences. To find these controls use the drop-down next to your username at the top right of the platform then enter your Profile. With these controls you’ll be able to:

  • Turn off email notifications completely
  • Turn off notifications for Contacts who are not assigned to you

We’ll be refining and tweaking how notifications work over the next few weeks, so we’d love to hear your feedback on notifications.

Channels

Since our last release, we’ve also been quite busy adding channels to the platform. So today we are introducing 5 new channels: Line, Telegram, Twitter, Kik & Viber. Each of these channels has an interesting and special niche which we will be exploring in a series of blog posts. If you’re you interested in these stories we’ll be happy to share them with you.

Bits And Bobs

As always, each release has a few extra bits that may not be groundbreaking or headline features but are still steps on the road to platform perfection. This release we’ve added the most requested feature by our own developers! Sign In with Google. So for those of you Google loyalists who hate typing in your passwords you’re in for quite the treat.

We’ve redesigned our settings module to fit our beautiful new design. There has been very little change in functionality, but for those of you who are addicted to parametric codes we’ve moved them away from the Dashboard and packed them into the settings menu. Love it or hate it this is in preparation for a revamp of the Dashboard Module so stay tuned.

The last little thing is the implementation of the Greeting Message. The Greeting Message is a simple on-boarding message that are sent to your Contacts when they first chat with your channel, a familiar feature for Facebook Page power users. Now with the latest update to Rocketbots, you’ll be able to implement this from our platform and across all your channels.

That's it for this release. See you next time.

Platform Releases

Iaroslav Kudritskiy
Chief Operating Officer
Iaroslav Kudritskiy is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of respond.io. He is a graduate of the MBA program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his previous roles include positions at Kodak Alaris, Xaxis and Light Reaction.
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