This article covers the use and creation of placeholders as part of content responses.
What Are Placeholders?
Placeholders are variable content that can be used in your content responses. These are useful as they add context to the message you’re sending to the customer and give prompts to the team to customise the response.
Using placeholders gives you much more flexibility and personalisation for your content responses.
How To Create Placeholders
To get started, click on Content Responses in the Configuration menu:
Then, click on Placeholders to display a list of existing placeholders, if you have any. To add a placeholder, click Add:
Give it a name, then decide the type you want to add. We’ll go through them separately below.
Manual
Manual placeholders will mean the user needs to add the content themselves. The name that you give it will show in the content response, so make sure if you use manual, it’s changed before you hit send!
Options
Options let you add display conditions, just like you can with content responses and variations, refer to Adding Content for more information on this.
Options on placeholders are useful if you only want to add information that you have to the content response. Let’s say for example you want to add personal data into the response, such as an order number or contact telephone number. It’s useful to add a display condition to make sure you have that information before trying to add it, you can use display conditions for this. You can add numerous display conditions for a placeholder, as you can see above.
Context
Context lets you use data unique to the interaction, and can be selected the same way as you would with display conditions. Please refer to Adding Content for a breakdown of how to select context. Common examples of context are:
- Customer Name
- Order Number
- Email Address
- Delivery Address
- Contact
- Telephone Number
- Customer Tier
These will automatically add to the response when you select it. Be sure that each placeholder has filled in, if you haven’t used options, you might be trying to display contextual data that you don’t have, in which case it will show as the name you gave it.
Navigating Placeholders
Placeholders can be searched for using a filter, that splits the results out based on the three types of placeholder, manual, options, and context.
The other option is to use the search icon on the right. You can search for the exact name you’re looking for, or you can use labels. Labels can be added to placeholders as you create them, simply type in a word, press enter, and it’ll be saved. You can add multiple labels to one placeholder. When you then come to search, you can type in the label name, and it will return the results that match that label. The system will tell you whether or not the search result matched the name or a label, and if a label; which one.
