How do I change initial Twilio Flex WebChat message from "BOT" to a more friendly name?

Question

I can see that by default the first message that is shown to the end user is from "BOT" . How do I change this to something a little more "human"? Perhaps something like "Agent"?

Id imagine customers a little apprehensive about just talking to a robot?

screenshot below of default "from"

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

The initial name "Bot" comes from templated strings in the FlexWebChat manager. The template string for the name is PredefinedChatMessageAuthorName.

You can override these strings once you have a FlexWebChat manager instance. To change the PredefinedChatMessageAuthorName you would do the following:

FlexWebChat.Manager.create(configuration)
    .then(manager => {
        manager.strings.PredefinedChatMessageAuthorName = "Agent";

        ReactDOM.render(
            <FlexWebChat.ContextProvider manager={manager}>
                <Flex.RootContainer />
            </FlexWebChat.ContextProvider>,
            document.getElementById("root")
        );
    });

Let me know if that helps at all.