Where a workflow can run

The four channels

A workflow belongs to one brand and can run anywhere that brand talks to people:

The chat widget — always. Every workflow can run here, whatever steps it contains.
Facebook Messenger — the brand's Facebook page conversations.
Instagram — the brand's Instagram direct messages.
Phone calls — a call answered by the brand's voice agent.

The Channels column on Brand → (your brand) → Workflows shows all four as icons on every row. A greyed-out icon means this workflow cannot run there; hover it and the tooltip says why.

This used to be invisible. A workflow could contain one step that quietly made it impossible to run on the phone, and nothing anywhere told you — you would build a phone workflow, publish it, and simply never see it fire.

What blocks Facebook and Instagram

A Form step, and nothing else.

Facebook and Instagram conversations have no way to display a Yaplet form, so a workflow that tries to open one cannot run there. The tooltip reads "Cannot run on Facebook — it contains a form step", and the same for Instagram.

Replace the form with Collect data or Ask question steps and the workflow becomes usable on both social channels. You lose the single-screen form and gain a short back-and-forth instead, which suits a messaging app better anyway.

What blocks phone calls

Any one of these seven steps: Form, Link, Buttons, Reply time, Request agent, Collect data or Ask question.

The first five need something a voice line does not have — a screen to render on, a link to click, a person to transfer to. The last two are a current limitation: on a call there is no chat message to hang the visitor's answer off, so the workflow cannot pause and resume on the caller's next sentence.

The tooltip spells the whole list out: "Cannot run on phone calls — it contains a form, link, buttons, reply-time, request-agent, collect-data or ask-question step".

Making a workflow phone-safe

Drop the visual steps

Remove forms, links and button menus. On a call there is nothing to look at and nothing to click.

Let the AI ask instead of collecting

Where the workflow was collecting fields or asking a stored question, hand the question to the brand's Vex agent with an AI bot step, which works on a call.

Remove the handoff

A call cannot be transferred to a colleague from inside a workflow, so Request agent and Reply time have to go.

Save and check the icons

Compatibility is recalculated on every save. Go back to the Workflows list and the phone icon should no longer be greyed out.

A workflow that starts another workflow inherits its restrictions. If a Custom bot step calls a workflow that contains a form, the caller is blocked from Facebook, Instagram and the phone too — even though its own steps look clean.

The extra requirement for phone

A voice agent is only offered your workflows when its brand also has a Vex AI agent. A brand with a phone agent but no Vex still answers callers from the brand's knowledge, and its API tools are equally unavailable during a call. Adding Vex to the brand is what switches both on. Creating a voice agent on a brand that already has Vex links the two behind the scenes, so most accounts never run into this.