Channels

A channel is a place your customers talk to you: Instagram, WhatsApp, your website's chat widget, a CRM, or any system that can send an HTTP request. Flowera's job is to make the same AgentFlow work across all of them — you build the conversation once, then connect it to as many channels as you need.

What a channel is

Every channel is three things stitched together:

1. A connection — the account or credential that proves you're allowed to send and receive on that platform. Set up once, on the Credentials page.
2. A trigger — the Start-node setting that decides which events on that channel start a run. Configured per flow; see Start triggers.
3. Actions — the nodes that send something back. On web chat that's Direct Reply. On Instagram and WhatsApp it's the channel's own send tool, in a Tool node or attached to an Agent.

That third point is where flows most often go wrong. Direct Reply is not channel-aware. It writes into the Flowera conversation — the chat widget's stream and the View Messages transcript — and calls no external platform. On web chat that is the delivery, so Direct Reply is all you need. On Instagram or WhatsApp, Meta only receives what a send tool hands it, so a flow that ends in Direct Reply appears to have answered while the customer gets nothing.

Reusing one flow across channels therefore means reusing the thinking part — trigger, retrieval, Agent — and giving each channel its own final send node.

Capability matrix

Action names are given as they appear in the product.

Channel	Trigger events	Actions after the trigger
Instagram	DMs, comments, mentions, story replies	Send Direct Message · Send Image Message · Reply to Comment · Send Private Reply · Hide Comment · Delete Comment
WhatsApp	Message received (13 message types)	Send Text Message · Send Template Message · Send Media Message · (Send Interactive Buttons — marked "Coming Soon" in the product)
Zoho CRM	Record created, edited, or deleted	Read/write records via the Zoho CRM tool or the HTTP node
Custom Webhook	Any HTTP request from any system	Whatever your flow does — the response can be returned to the caller
Web chat	A message in the widget, a shared link, or the canvas tester	Direct Reply; embed on your site; share a public link

Choosing a channel

If you want to…	Use
Answer questions on your own website	Web chat — the fastest to launch, no external account needed
Reply to Instagram DMs and comments automatically	Instagram
Run support or sales conversations on WhatsApp	WhatsApp
React to something changing in your CRM	Zoho CRM
Connect a platform Flowera doesn't build in	Custom Webhook

You don't have to pick one. A single flow can carry several triggers, and everything the flow learns — flow state, memory, collected leads — works the same regardless of which channel the message arrived on.

How setup, triggers, and actions fit together

Connect the account          Configure the trigger           Build the reply
(Credentials page,     →     (Start node, in the flow)   →   (the channel's send tool;
 once per account)            pick account + events            Direct Reply on web chat)

Two rules follow from that split:

• Connect first. A channel account has to exist before its trigger can offer it in a dropdown. If the account list is empty in the Start node, the connection is what's missing.
• One account, many flows. The same connected Instagram or WhatsApp account can drive several flows — route different events to different flows by choosing different events on each Start node.

Every run, whatever the channel, is recorded the same way: you can read the conversation in View Messages and the step-by-step trace in Executions.

In this section

• Instagram — DMs, comments, mentions, story replies
• WhatsApp — the 24-hour window, templates, media
• Zoho CRM — record events in and out
• Custom Webhook — connect anything that speaks HTTP
• Web chat — the widget, the share link, and the canvas tester