Robot — General Issues in the Flow Builder
This article contains general troubleshooting for issues that arise when using the flow builder (the chat flow editor).
How the Flow Builder Works
Before troubleshooting, it helps to understand how the flow builder is meant to work. The flow builder is a visual, drag-and-drop tool for designing the path your visitors follow through a conversation — think of it like a flowchart. No coding is required.
The canvas and block panel. The screen has two parts: a panel on the left listing every block type you can use, and a canvas on the right where you build your flow. You construct a conversation by dragging blocks from the panel onto the canvas.
Connecting blocks. Blocks run from top to bottom. Each block has a connection point at the bottom — drag from that point to the next block to link the two together. Your conversation then flows step by step along those connections.
The kinds of blocks you can use:
- Messaging and AI — plain text messages, free-text questions, email capture, clickable button choices, branching paths (Options), and handing the conversation off to AI.
- Media — embed images and videos (from a video host or a direct URL).
- Logic — Loop blocks to repeat a section of the conversation, and redirect blocks to send visitors to a URL.
Editing and saving. Double-click any block on the canvas to open its settings panel on the right, where you customize what it does. Click Save to keep your work — a status indicator shows the save in progress. You can preview and test the live conversation from the Widget Style section.
With that model in mind — blocks dragged onto a canvas, connected top to bottom, each one configurable — the troubleshooting tips below will make more sense.
First, you should use a modern, up to date browser such as Google Chrome — this is our recommended browser. Using a modern, up to date browser will fix a lot of issues.
Secondly, simply trying a different browser can fix a lot of issues… which often arise due to a local cache issue.
If your issue is that you’re finding it hard to navigate around a particularly large and complex flow, you can try zooming out in your browser using the “View” toolbar in your browser and then “Zoom Out” several times. Whilst we don’t have a native zoom in/out feature for the flow builder, your browsers own function can be useful for this in the meantime.
We are already working on an improved flowbuilder that makes navigating around larger flows easier.
That said, we highly recommend you keep flows as simple as possible, and use AI blocks to do heavy lifting in your flows. Also make use of “Loop” blocks to avoid building large flows that use many of the same elements.
For other issues relating to specific functions, see our troubleshooting section of the help desk.
Our getting FAQs also show how to use all of the common block types to see how the flow builder and the different blocks work.
Need more help?
If you've worked through this and still need a hand, contact support — we'll dig in with you.