New Features
We’ve rolled out a suite of powerful new features for AvoAI, including simple setup of AI Agents with pre-built recipes, and enhanced agent abilities like tagging contacts and triggering webhooks. This update also introduces a brand new Pay as You Go subscription.
Explore the full update log below to discover all the latest improvements and updates!
AvoAI Recipes for pre-written Agent Instructions
We’ve added a series of pre-written recipes that will create a new set of instructions for your AvoAI Agent to follow.
These are instructions that other Avochato users have had success using for specific use-cases - feel free to try them all or use them for the basis of a brand new experience!
How to use Recipes
To use a recipe to generate new Instructions, simply:
- Click on the recipe you’d like to try, which will show you the full list of instructions for that recipe.
- Edit and personalize these instructions however you’d like.
Pro Tip: You can have your Agent use templates, surveys, and campaigns in your recipes using the
$syntax!
- Hit “Save” — if your new Instructions are marked as “enabled”, your Agent will immediately begin using them in addition to any other “enabled” instructions. You can also mark them as “disabled” to come back to them later without changing your Agent’s behavior.
You can always edit your new instructions later and toggle them on or off to mix and match the instructions your AvoAI Agent uses when responding to inbound messages or generating suggestions.
As soon as you save any instructions, your AvoAI Agent will instantly behave differently. This can be done at any time, even mid-conversation with a contact.
If you don’t like your current instructions, you want to make them shorter or more precise, or if you want to replace them with another set of instructions, you can toggle them off and the AvoAI agent will forget them — that way you can decide one which instructions are best for your use-case.
“Disabled” instructions can be edited at any time and re-enabled in the future, so there is no harm in toggling them off while you figure out how you want your Agent to behave.
AI Agents can apply tags
You can now write instructions that allow AI Agents to apply tags in certain scenarios while handling a conversation.
We’ve created a recipe called “Add Tags to Conversation” that shows how to instruct your AvoAI Agent to apply a specific tag in a given situation.
Note: You must specify the exact tag names in your instructions that you wish to use, and the agent can only apply one tag at a time when handling an inbound message. The tags you leave off the list will never be applied by an AI Agent.
Only contacts that have conversations in your inbox will receive these tags, and only under the conditions you describe in your instructions.
AI Agents now apply a special tag when escalating a conversation
There is a new ai_escalation tag that is added automatically whenever any AI Agent escalates a conversation.
This tag expires after 1 day, and defaults to using Skill Routing.
This makes it easy to filter your inbox by all conversations or contacts that were escalated by the an agent to one of your teammates in the past day.
Classic Automations
We’ve added some shortcuts in the Automations tab that link to our “classic” automations, including Surveys and Keywords.
Agent Escalation Webhook
We now send a webhook to the URL of your choosing whenever the AI Agent escalates a conversation to one of your teammates.
This can be configured per inbox under Account > Integrations > Webhooks.
AgentAssist - Contact Digest
Users can now access the Contact Digest in the Agent Assist side-panel.
Clicking “Contact Digest” will generate the digest if it doesn’t already exist, and once its done, display the digest.
AvoAI Agents will reference the digest (assuming it exists) when generating responses or suggestions. This change makes it easier for users to reference it too, without having to navigate away from the current conversation.
Introducing the “Pay as you Go” plan
We’ve introduced a new “Pay as You Go” plan, available as an upgrade option when transitioning from the trial experience. To learn more, please visit our pricing page.
Updates
Onboarding Experience
We are continuing to make it clearer to our users what features we have and how to use them without overwhelming folks that are just learning about Avochato.
We are updating various call-outs and copy to highlight our latest and greatest features, including Analytics and our AI features
Number MGMT
There are new explanations in the app for what number you’re currently using, what you can use an Avochato number for, and the benefits of getting your own number.
Expect more radical changes in the coming months as we make it even easier to bring an existing number into Avochato.
Billing
- Optimized the upgrade flow from trial to paid plans. Users should now be able to reach the upgrade page in a fewer clicks.
- iOS users can finally view the billing tab and upgrade within the app. Thanks, Epic Games!
Widgets
- Every new inbox now begins with a chat widget that is fully live-chat enabled.
- The default widget can be customized and used immediately to interact via live chat while your account is active, even if you are on a trial or don’t have a phone number.
- You must upgrade to get a number and you cannot use the widget “text with us” feature if your inbox doesn’t have at least one Avochato number.
- Once you have specified a privacy policy URL for your Verified Brand, that policy URL will appear as a link in your Widget’s TCPA disclaimer for all SMS-enabled widgets.
Invite Users
We’ve simplified setting up your team:
- You can now invite a user and add them to the auto-assignment roster immediately.
- New users must accept the invite and accept our terms of service before they start to get assigned to conversations.
- Added an indicator for total available seats remaining across the organization
- Visual update to the page, including a shortcut to “view team” (scrolls you down the page)
- Updated instructions and page layout
- Added multiple help center articles about user management and roles, etc
Organization Management
Security
There is a new “Security” tab where owners can view the Organization’s security settings.
This includes a number of org-wide resources, the option to mass-enable MFA for the org, the list of SSO options available to the users in the org, and the list of whitelisted IP addressed (if any) for that org:
MFA
In the interest of enforcing MFA for all users, we now let org owners do it themselves. We also show a list of the teammates across the org without MFA so they know who to ping to get them to setup their phone or authenticator app.
Orgs that do not have MFA enforced will see a warning, and can click to require (with a disclaimer about the folks above not being able to log in)
Org owners can turn MFA ON, but for security purposes, you have to contact us to turn it OFF.
Login Policy
The login policy shows a table of the various SSO options and login methods that are enabled. For now, this cannot be changed unless contacting Avochato support.
Whitelisting
This little-known feature will display the list of whitelisted IPs that can connect to an organization. For now, it cannot be changed unless you contact us.
Organization Bulk Actions
New bulk actions have been added to make it a little easier to manage users across an organization, and manage a user’s membership across accounts in the organization.
Add or remove multiple users to/from an account or organization
Bulk User Membership Actions
When viewing an individual user in your organization, you can also select one or more accounts they belong to and mass-update their role(s) in those inboxes. You can also mass-edit various permissions they have, including enabling or disabling them in one or more inboxes (good for preventing action while retaining data, or temporarily pausing access) or changing whether they can call or text.
You can also just remove them from one or more inboxes all at once, which will free up a seat if they are removed from all inboxes in an organization.
We have also simplified the language around Seat utilization based on AvoAI in a few places in the org MGMT section
Verification
- NEW There is a new required “Privacy Policy” field for capturing the URL of the privacy policy of your brand with regards to data processing for customers with whom you register phone numbers and TCPA consent. Your privacy policy must be available via this publicly-accessible URL or google document. This field will also be used in your Website Widgets owned by your brand (if applicable) when rendering the disclaimer for submitting “Text with Us” option in any active widgets. Failure to provide a privacy policy will most likely lead to rejection by major carriers when applying for your Use-case, so we recommend always including one for all new brand registrations.
- Emphasis has been placed on selecting “Private For-profit” Brands, to eliminate confusion from Public For-Profit companies.
- We’ve made updates to the language and instructions for each form field.
- The “Archive” link now only appears if you have archived Use-cases.
Broadcasting
Broadcast Creation Flow Improvements
We've streamlined our Draft Broadcast interface to make it simpler and more intuitive to use, with fewer clicks.
Audience Selection (Step 2)
Multiple improvements to make contact selection faster and more user-friendly:
- Contacts that cannot be part of your broadcast (see part about Ineligible Contacts below) will not be added to your audience when using a bulk action
- Enhanced search functionality with automatic input focus
- Added keyboard navigation support (Tab + Enter to select)
- Improved contact search with phone numbers displayed alongside names
- Added clear button for search results
- Clearer messaging around custom field matching criteria
- Streamlined dropdown menus and search modals
Review & Send (Step 3)
- “Confirm and send” button is now prominently displayed at the top of the review page for expedience
- “Auto-assign To” and “Schedule” settings are now more visible and have been moved up the page
- “Number of contacts” will never include audience members that cannot receive the broadcast as mentioned a few paragraphs above — historically, these types of contacts were always skipped during the broadcast, but they would appear in this estimate and throw off the perceived cost.
- Clearer confirmation messages and improved layout
Ineligible Contacts
We now prevent adding ineligible contacts to your audience list when using actions in Step 2.
Previously, ineligible contacts could be added to a broadcast audience but would always be skipped when the broadcast was sent. This remains the same.
Avochato will continue to prevent sending messages if a contact becomes ineligible moments before we deliver the broadcast message to that contact (for example, if the contact opts out after getting added to your audience but before you send the broadcast).
An ineligible contact is one that is one or more of the following:
- Has no phone number, or an invalid phone number (most notably, Live Chat contacts)
- Marked as “blocked”
- Marked as “landline”
- Marked as “opted out”
This change is intended to reduce confusion on whether certain ineligible contacts in the inbox would be included, and should reduce perceived audience size (including the cost estimate for a broadcast).
Pricing Page
The Pricing page has received a make-over, including our new “pay as you go” pricing tier.
- We’ve also added a “return on investment” calculator to estimate the cost for a given plan using a given amount of volume per month. We want to emphasize the ROI that our current customers have while using Avochato (especially with AvoAI).
- The feature list has been more exhaustively updated
Campaigns
- Slight visual update to the campaigns list
Contacts
- Slight visual update to the contacts list
Logs
- Logs and Webhook Logs have received a slight visual update.
Others
- All new customers now get 5 waived seats from the trial onward, and you retain them no matter what plan you upgrade to.
- Your AvoAI Agent(s) each count towards a seat in your organization, and new inboxes begin life with an AvoAI Agent pre-configured in them.
Bug Fixes
AvoAI
- Agents no longer attempt to “view” old image attachments that exceed our data retention policy (e.g. inbound MMS from over one year ago) or attachments that are marked as “blocked content”. This should fix cases where Agents would stop responding when assigned to conversations with very large time windows, due to being unable to access those contents.
- Fixed various issues when generating the Contact Digest for contacts that were synced to deleted or inaccessible Salesforce records.
Inbox
- Fixed an issue where clicking a notification would’t take you to the associated conversation
- Various green/red/yellow popups from taking actions in the inbox have a slight visual update
- Visual update to error descriptions under messages
- Visual update to standardize various buttons
- Performance improvements when pushing notifications to the inbox
- Fixed a bug where clicking a Tag would take you to the wrong place
- Suggestions should never appear when viewing a live chat conversation that has been marked as ”closed”
- Links inside of AvoNotes now properly open in a new tab, including while using the Avochato Chrome Extension and mobile apps
Broadcasting
- Fixed a bug where the date shown in the “completed” list would show the Last Edited timestamp, not the start/completion dates for the delivery window of the broadcast.
Notifications
- In-App Notifications are now enabled by default for all new users
- Fixed an issue where getting assigned to a conversation would not actually generate a “new assignment” in-app notification for that user
- In “private” inboxes, we now create an “agent needed” in-app notification for Managers and Owners when an event happens for a conversation that has no active online user. Previously, we didn’t create a notification at all.
- Fixed an issue where call and voicemail email notifications were not respecting the proper profile settings.
- In-app Notifications should always indicate the inbox name that created the notification — and clicking that notification will take you to that inbox.
- Fixed an issue where AvoBots could get notifications (that no one would ever read)
Widgets
- Fixed a bug where widgets would reset their “auto-open timeout” to “never” whenever you made edits to your widget on other tabs (such as “customize appearance”)
- Fixed a bug in widget settings where widget previews showed incorrect text for the disclaimer and wouldn’t show the ToS checkbox.
- Fixed a bug where “customize appearance” would show black text color inputs (even though the default color was white)
Other
Fixed an issue where you could not create an inbox from the “Organization Management” section, regardless of your permissions and/or the number of available inboxes for that organization.