Creating a Web Experience Flow

A Web Experience engages visitors on your website – qualifying them and moving them toward a conversion such as capturing an email, starting a live chat, or booking a meeting. You build each one as a Flow, and more than one can run on the same page.

Table of Contents

• What is a Web Experience Flow?
• The four Flow types
• Creating a Flow
• Building the Flow
• How Experiences work together on a page
• Limiting how often an Experience appears
• Previewing and testing
• Publishing and versioning
• Adding Web Experiences to your website

What is a Web Experience Flow?

You build a Web Experience Flow in the same Flow Builder used for Chat Journeys – the same Trigger, the same nodes, and the same live preview. Each Flow is triggered by page and audience conditions, then runs the path you design. What changes between the types is what the visitor sees on the page: a banner, an offer card, a scheduling modal, or a chat conversation.

To find your Flows, open Flows in the left-side menu and select Web Experience. Each Flow is listed under its type, with its status, audience, and publishing history.

The four Flow types

When you create a Flow, you choose one of four types:

Chat is documented in its own article. This article and its companions cover the other three:

• Creating a Scheduling Flow;
• Creating an Offer Flow;
• Creating an Announcement Flow.

Creating a Flow

1. Open Flows in the left-side menu and select Web Experience;
2. Click Create New Flow at the top right;
3. Choose the Flow type – Chat, Scheduling, Offer, or Announcement;
4. Name the Flow. Use a name that identifies the page or campaign it serves, for example "Pricing Page Scheduling" or "Product Launch Announcement";
5. Build the Flow in the Flow Builder (see below), then publish it.

Your new Flow appears in the list under its type, in Draft until you publish it.

Building the Flow

A Web Experience Flow is built the same way as a Chat Journey. The Creating a Chat Journey article covers the shared pieces in full:

• Trigger – the first node of every Flow, setting the Location (where and when the Experience appears – URL, time on page, scroll, query parameter, device, language) and the Audience (who it appears for, using Chili Data and Salesforce rules for returning visitors whose email has been collected). The Trigger is also where you set how often an Experience appears – see Limiting how often an Experience appears;
• Nodes – Send a Message, Reply Buttons, Send Data Field, Routing Rules, and the CRM nodes for Salesforce and HubSpot;
• Copying and pasting nodes between Flows.

After the Trigger, each Flow type opens with its own node that shows the Experience to the visitor, and branches on how the visitor responds:

From there you build the path with the shared nodes. Most nodes work in any Flow type, so you can copy and paste between Flows – though some belong to one type only. A Scheduling Flow, for example, includes a Display Calendar node, which an Offer or Announcement Flow does not. Each companion article covers what is specific to its type.

How Experiences work together on a page

More than one Web Experience can run on the same page. To keep the page from becoming crowded, some combinations are prevented automatically. You can review this behavior in the Web Experience Behavior panel at the top of the Flows list.

• Announcements can appear alongside other Experiences;
• When a visitor is actively using Chat, Scheduling and Offer Experiences do not appear;
• If a Scheduling or Offer Experience is already visible, Chat can still open;
• When a visitor is eligible for both a Scheduling and an Offer Experience, the Scheduling Experience is shown. Scheduling takes precedence over Offer.

Note: An Announcement banner is designed to sit alongside the other types, so it never suppresses – and is never suppressed by – a Scheduling, Offer, or Chat Experience.

Limiting how often an Experience appears

In the Flow's Trigger node, you can cap how often a single visitor sees an Experience, so a returning visitor is not shown the same one repeatedly:

• Maximum Impressions per Visitor – a lifetime limit on how many times the Experience appears to a visitor. Leave it empty for no limit;
• Cooldown after Dismissal – hide the Experience for a set period after a visitor dismisses it.

Use the two together to control repeat appearances.

Previewing and testing

There are two ways to check a Flow before it runs for real visitors.

Preview a single Flow. From within a Flow's own Flow Builder, preview that Flow on its own. This does not require the install snippet on your website.

Test Experiences together. To see how your Experiences behave together, as a visitor would, use Test Web Experiences on the Flows page. This requires the install snippet on the page and the Flow to be active. It loads your live page and lets you simulate the Trigger's When conditions – Time on page, Page scroll, URL, Query parameter, Device type, and Browser language – so you can confirm each Experience appears under the right conditions.

Publishing and versioning

A Flow runs on your website only after it is published. Each Flow tracks its version history, so you can see previous versions and restore one if a change causes a problem – the same version history described in Creating a Chat Journey.

Adding Web Experiences to your website

All Web Experience Flows run on the same Chili Piper install snippet – there is no separate script per Flow, and no additional snippet once the first one is installed. Find your snippet on the Embed tab of the Web Experience page.

The Announcement Flow has one extra setting that controls whether its banner overlays the page or pushes your content down. See Creating an Announcement Flow for how to configure it.

Viewing logs

Every time a Flow runs for a visitor, it is recorded in Logs, in the same place as your Chat logs. The logs show which Experiences appeared, how visitors responded, and where they dropped off – useful for confirming a Flow is triggering as intended.