I'm developing a bot for use inside an organisation that has different support teams for the different company functions (IT, HR, payroll, resourcing etc.).
The bot has a number of different topics but all of them finish up with a "more info" step that presents the user with a clickable URL for a guide, a policy or an intranet page where the topic they've been finding out about is more fully described.
And of course the bot, after presenting the "more info" step asks "did that answer your question", and if the user replies "no", redirects through Confirmed Failure to Escalate, which presents a list of the different support teams with phone and email info for each (using power automate to format as a Markdown table).
I was asked if the contact list could be shortened to show the one of two departments that the user should contact, based on the "more info" they've just been shown - for example a more info about annual leave should show the contact details for the HR team, while one for the impact of maternity on your pay might show HR and Payroll.
I can imagine that one way to do this would be to pass a "ContactDept" variable from the originating topic through More Info > End of Conversation > Confirmed Failure > Escalate, but that would mean changing the system topics to have a ContactDept question as the first node ... probably not a good idea, especially as they can be triggered directly.
Or I could implement a set of "shadow" topics that contained the ContactDept variable and the same logic as the system topics, leaving the system topics with their triggers and a single step redirecting to the shadow version with a "show all contacts" value for the ContactDept - my topics would use the shadow topics instead of the system topics. But would that cause an issue with any system-related actions associated with the system topic (like flagging success/failure)?
One other potential would be to use some kind of session cookie/browser storage that could be set by the originating topic and retrieved by the Escalate topic. Is that possible in PVA or with Power Automate?