Web Messaging Bot Flow - Data Action Email Capture

Genesys Cloud WFM
1

Hi all,

We’re running into something odd with web messaging bot flows - specifically with capturing the email address via a Data Action. It’s kind of similar to that thread from a couple months ago about data types in Data Actions, but this feels different.

The flow is pretty simple. It starts with a web messaging widget, asks for the email address, then uses a Data Action to pull that email into a variable for a transfer to an agent. The ‘Transfer to Agent’ node is configured to pass the email as a customer field. We need it for reporting in Workforce Engagement.

The problem is, sometimes - not always - the email value is showing up as null when it hits the ‘Transfer to Agent’ node. The user sees the form, submits their email, the bot acknowledges, but then the agent receives a transfer with no email. It’s very inconsistent.

I’ve checked the Data Action configuration, and the email field is definitely mapped to a text type variable. I’ve tried changing it to a string, just in case. No luck. The Data Action logs show the email address being received correctly, but then it appears to disappear before the transfer.

We’ve also seen this happen when the customer uses special characters in the email. Like a plus sign (+) or a period (.). It’s like the system can’t handle the email address correctly.

I looked through some old posts and saw someone mention that sometimes Data Actions return everything as strings, even when the mapping specifies a different type. That’s frustrating - the documentation doesn’t really cover this.

The API endpoint we’re using for the Data Action is the one configured in our Data Action settings. We’re on the current stable release of Genesys Cloud, and haven’t made any recent changes to the Data Action itself.

We tried a workaround of adding a JavaScript node before the ‘Transfer to Agent’ node to check for a null value and, if found, repopulate the email from the web messaging session data. It’s…working, but feels like a kludge. It’s not ideal to have an extra step like that.

Anyone else run into this? It’s impacting the quality of the agent interaction and is making it difficult to get accurate reporting.

2

I apologize if this is a basic question, but the data action configuration may be causing the issue. We’ve found the ‘response format’ setting is often missed during initial setup. The system expects a JSON payload even for simple string transfers, and it must conform to the schema.

Specifically, the Data Action must return a JSON object with the email address nested within a key. Something like this -

{
 "email_address": "{{contact.email}}"
}

The ‘Transfer to Agent’ node then expects to find the email within this structure. It won’t automatically parse a raw string.

Also, check the data type mapping on the Data Action’s output parameter. It must be set to ‘String’ - the system sometimes defaults to ‘Integer’ or ‘Boolean’ and you will get a 400 error. I’m not sure if the error logs will show this, but it’s worth checking the action’s configuration in the Genesys Cloud admin interface.

fwiw, we also had problems with SAML metadata refreshing recently - maybe there is a common issue with the system.

1 Like