Flow XO Features

• Flow XO chat widget: The Flow XO chat widget is fairly basic and has average functionality. The end-user can send text and files, but there are no options for things like video, GIFs, or images. For this functionality, you’ll need to use third-party integrations.
• Answer simple questions: By identifying exact phrases or specific keywords within a conversation, Flow XO’s chatbot can provide answers to common questions.
• Provide multiple-choice answers: Rather than having customers type every response, you can use Flow XO to ask questions that have clickable, multiple-choice answers. For example, if your company offers multiple services, allow your customer to select the one that's relevant to their inquiry.
• Broadcasting: Broadcast your messages to your active users with the help of webhooks and triggers.
• Live chat: Flow XO allows you to switch between chatbots and live agents, however, this can only be done by monitoring conversations and manually taking over. By needing to manually take over a conversation while actively monitoring conversations with bots, this defeats one of the main benefits that other live chat software platforms provide, which is the ability for a bot to send alerts and notifications to your live chat agents when human intervention is needed.

• Automated workflows: At any stage in an automated conversational chat, a workflow can be triggered to perform a variety of tasks related to the conversation.
• User data and interaction history: Flow XO allows you to collect some user data and stores it for you on the platform. Additionally, interaction history between your bots and your audience are stored and viewable.

• Accept payments through your bot: Flow XO is capable of taking payments via Stripe. For example, if it identifies a particular product or service that your customer wants to purchase, it can simply request a payment, specifying the currency and amount to be paid, and a link is automatically created that will take your customer to a secure payment portal to complete the transaction.
  
  Once a payment has been processed, an integrated action is triggered and your workflow can continue, such as sending a confirmation email or introductory welcome message.

• Analytics: Flow XO’s analytics include the following metrics: Total Users, Active Users, Number of Flows Triggered, New Users, Messages Sent, Messages Received, Top Messages, and Top Flows.
• Platforms available: Flow XO is available to use on different marketing channels. The most popular channels include web chat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Twilio, and Slack.

Flow XO Pros and Cons

Pros - Flow XO

• Marketing toolset: Flow XO has a number of marketing tools to take advantage of. These include Facebook Messenger tools like Ads and auto-responders, custom URLs for your bot, and landing pages.
• Omnichannel: Flow XO works across different channels where you can build chatbot widgets for your website or integrate them with suitable third-party platforms such as Facebook Messenger.
• Workflows and triggers: Although not ‘intelligent’, Flow XO can trigger conversational flows based on keywords. These flows can consist of text, images, files, answers, payment links, etc.
• Ecommerce options: With Flow XO you can accept payments. You will however need to use Stripe to process those payments. If that’s not an issue for you, the upside is not needing to handle any credit card information.
• Free plan has few limitations: Getting a feel for Flow XO is easier than it is with some other platforms. The only restriction is your access to chat data and the number of messages/interactions your bot can have, which is 500.
• No coding skills required: Although bots are complicated to build using Flow XO, the user interface itself is fairly intuitive and does not require programming skills.

Cons - Flow XO

• Building bots is far more complicated than it should be: The reason why building a Flow XO bot is so difficult is because you’ll need to connect one or more third-party tools to create an even slightly sophisticated workflow. Although the user interface is up to par, the ability to actually create a chatbot in a reasonable amount of time is an issue. This is due to the strange decision to rely on other tools to perform actions that many other chatbot platforms have built themselves. The process of building a Flow XO bot feels counter-intuitive and unnecessarily difficult. Other chatbot builders have made the process of building bots a much more seamless process.
• Lacks a proprietary technology in general: After logging-into Flow XO, you quickly realize that there’s not a lot you can do without building workflows that include third-party software. You will need to use a lot of third-party tools in-order to have much of the functionality that Flow XO’s competitors have built natively.
• No AI/machine learning technology built-into the platform: Like much of Flow XO, if you want an ‘intelligent’ chatbot, you’ll need to use Dialogflow. Unfortunately, Dialogflow is the only option available to build an AI-powered chatbot on Flow XO.
• No tagging or user segments available: The ability to segment your audience will have to be handled outside of Flow XO or will require a third-party integration.
• Can’t see the user input where your chatbot couldn’t answer the question: Without the ability to filter out all the messages where your chatbot couldn’t provide an answer, or failed to properly answer a question, it’s very difficult to make your chatbot ‘smarter’ or to improve the usefulness of your chatbot and its ability to answer questions.
• No easy human to bot handoff for live chat: Unless you have a live chat agent monitoring the interactions between your audience and your chatbot, you’ll need to rely on your chatbot to handle 100% of the interaction. There’s two big problems here:
  
  1. A lot could go wrong if your chatbot is fully responsible for all customer and site visitor interactions. This is especially true for chatbots like Flow XO that don’t have an AI-powered chatbot of their own.
  
  2. Without the ability to trigger notifications to your live chat agents, those agents need to monitor the conversation and manually take control when a human is needed. This more or less defeats the main benefits of using chatbots in general.

Flow XO Review - Final Analysis

Flow XO is a unique chatbot platform that’s taken a different approach than many other web chat applications. While Flow XO does a lot of things well, such as the ability to create multiple workflows and deploy your chatbot across multiple platforms/channels, it also does a lot quite poorly when compared to other top chatbot building platforms.

The biggest downside to Flow XO is that you’ll need to hack everything together using third-party integrations, resulting in a Frankenstein like chatbot. One thing we know about relying heavily upon integrations, is that they need to constantly be maintained, and they never provide as much functionality as they’re capable of on their own.

Ultimately, the complications that will arise by adopting Flow XO are too great for us to recommend using the platform. There’s nothing we can identify that Flow XO does that the competition doesn’t, and the features that place Flow XO into some of the best chatbot categories, although notable, the competition simply does better.