Watermelon guide

Get started with Watermelon

Learn all about building chatbots and become an automation expert.

Table of contents

Setting up your platform

Now that you know what you want to achieve, it’s time to dive in and set up your Watermelon platform. The very first thing to do is of course to log in to your Watermelon account. You can access the Watermelon platform in your browser, or by downloading the Mac or Windows apps..

Adding agents

Because teamwork makes the dream work, it’s a good idea to start with adding your colleagues to your Watermelon platform. After all, when the chats start flowing in, you don’t want to handle them all by yourself.

To add new agents in your platform, navigate to the Settings menu and select the first option, Create/edit agents. Here you can click the Create agent button and fill in the name and email address of your colleague. At the top of the page you can also select the role of your colleague. You can select from two options:

Support agent

As a support agent in Watermelon, you have the ability to pick up and answer conversations, forward conversations to other agents, add tags or notes to conversations and edit your personal settings.

Admin

As an Admin you have full access to the Watermelon platform. You can edit or create new agents, add new channels, create and manage your chatbot, access the statistics and edit all the settings. Of course you can also manage all the conversations within your platform.

Once you’ve entered all the information and selected the correct role for your colleague, you can click the Create agent button. Your colleague will now receive a confirmation email with a temporary password. After logging in to their new account, your colleagues can update their password.

watermelon agents overview

Connecting your channels

Now that you’ve added your colleagues to your platform, you can connect your first conversational channel.

Navigate to the Settings menu and select the second option, Add/edit channels. Here you can select which channel you want to add to your Watermelon platform:

Website Widget

The website widget is perhaps the most commonly used channel for your chatbot and for live chat. To create a widget for your website, simply click the Add new website widget button and fill in the URL of your website. You are now shown a short snippet of Javascript code. This is the code you need to add to your website to publish that chat widget. In this article we explain how you can add the code to your website.

When you click Set up account, you can start customising your widget with your own icon, colours and messaging. Read this article to learn much more about the customisation options for your website widget.

Facebook Messenger

The biggest name in social media, Facebook Messenger is a valuable tool for any business wanting to engage with their customers. Once connected to your Watermelon platform, the Facebook Messenger channel allows you to see and respond to messages sent directly to your Facebook Business page, right here in your Watermelon platform. Both in person or automated with your chatbot!

Connecting Facebook Messenger is as simple as selecting the channel and logging in to your Facebook account. In this article you can read exactly how you can connect your Facebook account. After you’ve selected the Facebook Business page you want to use, you’re ready to go!

WhatsApp

Nowadays, WhatsApp is by far the most used messaging service in Europe and most of the rest of the world. With millions of people using WhatsApp every day, it is quickly becoming an important part of customer service. As a business, being available on WhatsApp allows you to offer customers an easily accessible way to communicate using a service they are already familiar with.

Connecting a WhatsApp number to Watermelon requires a paid WhatsApp Business Account and a few extra verification steps through Facebook. In this article you can read all about the requirements for connecting your WhatsApp number to Watermelon. To help you with this process, you can always contact your Customer Onboarding Specialist or your Customer Success manager at Watermelon.

When you’ve connected your WhatsApp number to Watermelon, you can start receiving WhatsApp conversations in your Watermelon platform and respond to them with your chatbot!

Instagram

Perhaps the most active social media platform right now is of course Instagram. With millions of users every day, Instagram is a tool that can not be forgotten in today’s online world. And with a messaging channel as easy as Instagram Direct Messages, it’s only logical to automate these conversations with your chatbot as well.

To connect Instagram to your Watermelon platform, first make sure that your Instagram account is an Instagram Business account and is connected to a Facebook Business Page. You can now select the Instagram channel in Watermelon and click the Login with Facebook button.

In the Facebook pop up you can log in with your Facebook account. Next select the Instagram Business account you want to connect and the Facebook Business page the Instagram account is associated with. After selecting the necessary permissions you get back to Watermelon where you can confirm the Instagram Business account you want to connect. You are now ready to automate your Direct Messages, directly from Watermelon!

For more in depth information about connecting your Instagram account, read this article.

watermelon dashboard whatsapp view

Out of office message

Around the clock availability is an easy achievement for your chatbot, but human agents for live chat are of course only available during working hours. To manage the expectations of your customer outside of your colleagues’ working hours, it’s useful to set up an out of office message.

In the Settings menu, you can navigate to the Out of office option. At the top of the page you can see a text box with a default message in there. This is the message your customers will automatically see when the chatbot forwards a conversation to the agents, outside of office hours.

After typing in an appropriate message, you can check the box to set your working hours. In the now visible fields, you can enter your available times per day. During these hours your chatbot can forward conversations to the agents. Outside of these hours, the out of office message will automatically be sent to customers as soon as the chatbot forwards a conversation to an agent.

Tip: to set a day as completely unavailable, set the start and end times to the same time. For example, if your team is not available on Sundays, you can set the times to 23:00 till 23:00.

For more information about out of office messages, read this article.

watermelon dashboard out of office view

Creating Teams

By now you’ve added your colleagues to your platform, and the next step is to divide them into their own departments or teams. Using teams in your Watermelon platform is a great way to categorise and separate conversations based on context or topic. When you’ve created your teams, your chatbot can automatically forward conversations to the right teams, based on the topic of the conversation. This way the customer always gets connected to the right people when they need it.

To create your teams, navigate to the Settings menu and open the Create/edit teams option. Here you can click the Create a new team button, after which you can enter the name of the team. Optionally, you can enter a description for this team. This description is only visible internally. As the last step you can add your agents to this team.

Note: the name of the team is visible to your customers when a conversation is forwarded to that team, so make it an appropriate one!

Once the teams are created, the agents can see the conversations assigned to their team(s) in the Conversation overview. In the left column under the Teams tab, agents can see the teams they’re assigned to and monitor the conversations from there.

Read this article for more information about creating Teams.

watermelon dashboard teams view

Adding Custom fields

When you’re having conversations with your customers, there can be a lot of information you want to keep track of. Names, contact information, customer numbers, order numbers, or topics they wish to discuss. All important bits of information you want to keep around, especially if you have a lot of returning customers. With the use of Custom fields you can easily expand the customer profile that’s visible on the right side of the screen during conversations.

By default there are four fields available in the customer profile; First name, Last name, Phone number and Email address. To add your own fields, you can simply navigate to the Settings menu and open the Custom fields option. Here you can see the four default fields. To create a new field, click the grey field on the bottom, labelled Create a new input field. You can now select an icon for internal uses, type in a name for this field, set the type of input for this field, and decide whether this input is unique to the customer.

Unique fields are seen as identifying information for customers. Information such as phone numbers, email addresses or client numbers are unique per person and can be used to identify customers. First names, addresses or company names are not unique, as multiple people can have the same input for these fields.

Fields labelled as unique are used by Watermelon to automatically merge contacts when a previously used input is filled in. For example, when a phone number is recognised, this contact will automatically be merged with the contact where the same phone number was previously entered.

In this article we explain in more detail how you can create your custom fields.

watermelon dashboard custom fields view

Setting up Notifications

The final thing you want to do is enable your notifications. Of course you want to be notified when there are new conversations waiting for you, so when you navigate to the Settings menu and select the Notification preferences, you can set these up.

In Watermelon there are two types of notifications; Desktop and Email notifications. Desktop notifications are notifications received through your web browser or in your desktop notifications if you use our desktop apps. With Email notifications you can choose to receive an email whenever there is a new conversation waiting for you.

With both types of notifications, you can also select when you want to receive the notifications. You can choose to receive notifications for every new unassigned conversation, for every new message in conversations, for chatbot conversations, or just for your own conversations.

Every agent can customise these settings individually. Once you’ve selected the right notifications for you, don’t forget to press Save and you’ll never miss a conversation again.

To get even more information about setting up the right notifications for you, read this article.

watermelon dashboard notifications view

Step 3. Building your chatbot

Let’s start building your chatbot! We’ll help you with the right preparations and guide you through the process of creating your automated conversations.

Next step

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