Custom Action Step

What is a Custom Action step? How do I mock a step in my Voiceflow assistant? How do I simulate a development step?

The Custom Action Step is designed as a placeholder step to stub in a more complex, development step in your Voiceflow assistant. This allows you to simulate a custom user flow or function, such as transferring to a live agent on another platform, and provide context about the outcomes of the action during design-developer handoff. 

In an assistant design, a custom action should be used as a placeholder for any functions that are not inherently possible to build, or considered to be too complex to make on Voiceflow. For example, in a website intake marketing chat assistant, if there is a function that connects the user to a live agent and would need to be developed outside of Voiceflow, then a Custom Action step would be used to stub this operation. 

Designing a Custom Action

The action step allows for adding custom labels and paths to your canvas. This is useful for creating mock actions or paths. Here is an example of using an action step to simulate a payment:

Name: Credit Card Payment

Path 1 (default path): Payment Successful 

Path 2: Payment Pending

Path 3: Card Denied

Testing a Custom Action

During shared prototyping, the user will always proceed down the default path when they run into the action step. If guided navigation mode is on, the test will stop on the action step and buttons are presented for which path to take.

To learn more about using custom action steps in the development environment, check out the Custom Actions tutorial in our developer documentation.