Bot not working the same when published to Teams

[Daveed1973]

I have created a bot which isn't behaving the same way in Teams as it does in the test bot.

It starts with a topic called Greeting, which simply displays a basic greeting to the user. This then goes to another topic called InitialQuestions which asks for customer name amongst other information. It then goes to another topic called Package which asks series of questions to build a package. At the end it displays a message with the configured package and says "type start to start over". This then goes to a topic called Start Over which displays a simple message and then goes back to the Greeting topic again.

It works perfectly fine using the test bot, but when published to Teams after typing start and it asking for the customer name again it then says "Sorry, I am not able to find a related topic. Can you rephrase and try again?". The only way out of this loop is to type in a greeting such as hello.

Ideally I need the Start topic in there as users may need to restart the Bot at any time without going through all the questions first. Any ideas why it may be behaving in this way?

Thanks in advance.

[renatoromao]

Hi @Daveed1973 ,

This behavior maybe is related that when you start a conversation with the chatbot inside the TEams, automatically he starts the Greeting topic (it's the default behavior).

Do you have any questions about the Greeting topic?

Can you take a picture of your chat with the bot inside the Teams? 

[Daveed1973]

Hi, thanks for your response. I have attached some images showing what is happening.

So in this image, I get to the end of the chat session and it presents the user with the option to type start to start again. The Start Over topic just redirects to the Greeting topic which in turn directs to the InitialQuestions topic asking for customer name. As you can see, after typing in the name of "testing" it then throws the message "Sorry, I am unable to find a related topic".

Then if I type in a greeting trigger phrases such as Hello or Hi. It triggers the Greeting topic again and then it works.

This is my Greeting topic.

Hope that helps shed some light on this?

[renatoromao]

Thank you @Daveed1973 !

I already get the same issue.

Try to send a question called "What is the customer's name?" in another topic instead of using inside the Greeting topic. And inside your Greeting topic, show a message "hi..." and redirect the user to your new topic that contains the Customer name question.

[Daveed1973]

Unfortunately the topics already work that way. The Greeting topic simply displays a message greeting the user and then redirects to another topic called InitialQuestions which is the topic which asks for the customer name. 

I originally had all questions from the InitialQuestions topic in the Greeting topic, but had the same issue. So moved the questions out into the InitialQuestions topic but still get the same issue.

This is the Greeting topic...

This is the InitialQuestions topic

[renatoromao]

That is fine! @Daveed1973 

You can open a ticket inside the PVA support, they can investigate and understand the internal issue: https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/support

And I will report it to the Microsoft team.

[Daveed1973 · Accepted solution]

Found a workaround for this. Instead of using the system topic Start Over, I've created a new topic called End the Chat and added trigger words such as stop, exit, quit etc. Then instead of having the user type start to start over again (which would have triggered the Start Over topic), they type in one of the triggers from the system topic Greeting such as Hi, Hello etc.

This seems to work.