Flows

A flow is a sequence of steps ARCY carries out inside your Product for a user, such as inviting a teammate. You build and publish flows on Autopilot > Flows. Steps are delivered through the chat, never as overlays on your page.

Before you start

• The environment you are working in needs a verified domain assigned to it. Without one the element picker and the preview have no site to open. See Origins.
• arcy.js must have been seen on your Product at least once, or the builder cannot target elements. See Quickstart.
• Your Plan sets how many flows you can hold. Past the cap, Create flow is disabled. See Billing.

Setting it up

Create flow asks only for a Name. Only your team sees it. The new flow opens in the builder as a draft and reaches nobody until you publish it.

Steps. Each step does one thing. Click activates an element. Fill asks the user a question in chat, then types the answer into a field. Navigate opens a path such as /settings/team or a full https:// address. A flow holds at most 30 steps.

Picking the element. Target Element opens the page you name in a new tab with the picker on. Click the element there and it lands in the step. Two controls tune how ARCY finds it later: Matching, which you loosen when ARCY finds nothing and tighten when it finds the wrong thing, and If several match, use, which picks the nth match from the top of the page. Turn on This element's text is dynamic for labels such as "3 items in cart". A page on a domain that is not verified for this environment is refused before any tab opens.

Fill steps. Write the Question to ask in chat as a full sentence, because the user reads it word for word. Insert attribute puts one of your attributes into the question or a URL, so /orgs/{{ user.organization_id }}/settings sends each user to their own page. Set Expected input type (optional) when the field itself does not say what it accepts. An answer that does not fit is refused and asked again.

Triggers. A step can carry triggers that watch a Condition while the step is active and then act: Go to step or Dismiss flow. Conditions read an attribute, the current page, an element's state, a text input's value, the time, whether the user is idle, or whether this is a first visit, combined with AND and OR. While a fill step waits for its answer, its triggers pause.

Flow settings. Public name is what users see when ARCY offers the flow. Leave it empty and the flow never reaches them. Summary is what the agent reads to decide when to offer the flow, so describe the task in the words a user would use. Audience is who the flow reaches. Element wait limit is a limit, not a delay: a step acts the moment its element appears and gives up after this many seconds, up to 60, default 30.

Finish. Turn on End of the flow on one step. If you mark none, the last step is the finish. The step still runs.

Save, Preview, Publish. Saving is one explicit action and every step has to be complete first. Preview runs the saved draft on your own site as you, in a new tab, and records nothing in analytics. Publish sends the saved copy to one environment at a time.

What it changes

Who reaches a flow. A visitor is Identified when they have a user id and at least one attribute you sent us, and Anonymous otherwise. Everyone reaches every visitor. Identified only and Anonymous only reach one side. Persona, Customization and Localization apply the same split. A visitor the flow excludes never sees it: not in the widget's flow list, not among the starter flows, not in an agent suggestion. The Identified and Anonymous tabs above the list show what each side can reach.

Publishing. Each environment serves its own copy and is in one of four states: Never published, Published, Pending changes when the environment serves an older copy than your saved draft, and Unpublished. Publishing overwrites the copy an environment serves and there is no version history and no way back to the old one. Saving a live flow moves that environment to Pending changes until you publish again. Unpublish takes the flow out of one environment at once and leaves the flow itself untouched.

Measurement. ARCY counts how far users get through every flow, including users who did the steps on their own without opening the widget. A click step and a fill step are measured, and a step still counts when the element's text or position has changed since you picked it. A navigate step is measured when it opens a page on your own Product and the URL has no wildcard. A funnel needs two measurable steps, and the settings panel says why a flow has none. The numbers appear on Lift, reached from View on Lift in the builder.

Deleting. Delete removes the flow, its steps and its funnel. A flow that is live in any environment must be unpublished everywhere first.

When it goes wrong

• A step cannot find its element. The flow stops after the wait window, the user sees a short apology in their language and can keep chatting. The stop is recorded as an error on Pulse, and if ARCY finds a replacement it offers the fix in the step.
• The list says flows are serving an older copy. Those environments hold pending changes. Open each flow and publish again.
• Your save is refused. Someone on your team saved the same flow while you had it open. Copy what you need, then choose Reload the flow.
• The picker opens your site but nothing arrives. Switch to the new tab: ARCY writes the reason there. The usual causes are arcy.js missing on that page, a Content-Security-Policy that blocks cdn.arcyai.com, or the page carrying a different environment Token.
• Publish is disabled. Save first, and give the flow at least one step.

See also

• Pulse
• Lift
• Customization