Action Builder: How to Get the Most out of Workflow Builder with API calls

Introduction

As a self-service product, it is imperative to empower our users with the essential tools for tailoring the Solve Widget to meet the unique needs of their customers and industry. At Forethought, we prioritize the facilitation of flexible workflow creation through our Action Builder. This supplementary feature adds depth and dimension to static workflows, ensuring a customized and enriched user experience.

What is Action Builder?

While Workflow Builder is used to create step-by-step workflows per intent, Action Builder allows users to utilize Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to retrieve information from another service or program. This will create an action that saves the response fields as context variables, which can be used for any workflow within Workflow Builder. These Actions are the driving force for creating workflows tailored to specific user requests, such as "Check Order Status", "Find nearby Locations", etc.

Why should I use Action Builder?

Actions provide an opportunity to deflect commonly asked questions that are a quick look up on the agent's end. While keeping data secure through an API, customers can access this information quickly without needing to navigate through the customer support process.

How to Use Action Builder

Pre-requisites

Have this API information ready before you begin:

• The API Endpoint, also known as the Request URL
• The parameters (usually a key-value pair)
• Any header arguments
• If needed, the Bearer Token for Authorization
• The REST API Method (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE)
• The fields from the response that you want to save as context variables

This section will walk through a simple Action, which uses customer input to retrieve a response.

1. On the left sidebar, navigate to the Action Builder tab, and click the + create new action button in the top right corner to begin creating an action. 
2. In the Endpoint section, enter the API information, then click Send to view the Response on the bottom.
   
   •  Context variables can be used as values for the input parameters. Type "$" into the textbox to select one from the list.
3. Enter test values for context variables if prompted.
4. For the Output Parameters section, click on one of the Response fields to save the value as a context variable, then click Continue.
5. Enter a title and quick description for the action, then click Save.
6. That's it. You're finished! 🎉 The action should now be available via the lightning bolt icon when building workflows in Workflow Builder.