Bot Skill: Phone Capture

For many of our customers, having the phone number of a prospect or lead is essential to follow up or schedule a meeting. You can use the Phone Capture skill to intelligently capture someone's phone number and save it to their contact record!

In this doc, we'll cover 

• adding a phone capture skill
• configuring the skill's setup
• customizing the outputs

Bot Playbooks and skills are available on our Essential plan and above.

Adding a Phone Capture

Head to any of your existing Playbooks or create a new one from the Marketplace. Once you're in the visual builder, click the + icon, Add skill, and then Phone Capture.

You'll see the following node dropped into your builder:

You'll see two outputs as well: Valid phone number and Invalid phone number.

Configuring the Skill

If you click the Phone Capture node, you'll be brought into a modal that will allow you to customize how the skill will function. You can

• edit and format the text that will be presented to the visitor
• select how many times to ask for a phone number
• select a default accepted country code

A correct phone number input might look like this: 

(Country/US State Area Code) Remaining Digits 

Example: 

• United States +1: (Area Code)-555-5555
• United Kingdom +44: 44-5555-5555
• Australia +61: 61-5-5555-5555

Once you've configured the setup, click Save and close. Next, click any of the outputs. You'll be brought into an Outputs modal where you can configure the text the bot serves in response to a a visitors' input, as well as apply contact attributes, lead stages, CQL score, etc.

When you're finished, click Save and close. You may want to take those different outputs down separate paths - you can do that, too! Click the + icon next to the Outputs node to configure how you'd like your flow to proceed. 

For more information on building different paths, head to the "Building a New Path" section of this doc.

Asking for a Phone Number in an Agent Conversation

Unlike an email capture, if an agent asks for a phone number within a conversation and it is provided, it does not automatically get added to the contact record. Click on the contact info in the sidebar within the Conversation view, and add it to the 'Phone' attribute!

A Quick Note on Testing Your Playbooks

If you are testing a Playbook and a phone capture doesn't seem to fire for you or gets skipped, it's more than likely because the bot knows who you are, through the use of cookies! Make sure you're testing in a new incognito window with every test or clear your cookies if you'd like to see the skill in action.

You can also look for this behavior within the conversation view. You'll see "Question skipped - phone already known" appear as an event within the conversation!

Still stuck? Email us at support@drift.com. Not using Drift yet? Get your free account here.