When it comes to streamlining your support processes, conversation assignments are often a good place to find some quick wins. Between reviewing the queue, assessing individual conversations, and selecting appropriate assignments, your entire team can end up sinking a ton of time into the process. But with Kayako's automation tools, you can instantly route certain conversations to certain agents or teams. That means less time spent deliberating and more time spent solving problems for your customers.
In this article we'll take a look at a couple of the key conditions and actions you can use when building assignment automations. Then we'll walk you through a few of our favorite examples, to help you get started.
Understanding how assignment automations work
You can route conversations to a particular agent or team based on pretty much any criteria you can think of. Using the condition selectors when you're building your automations, you can specify any subset of conversations you like, based on their organization, priority, tags, custom fields — really, you name it. That means that if you train your support team to assign conversations based on certain criteria, you can probably train Kayako to assign conversations using those very same criteria.
NOTE: For further evidence of the breadth of choices you have here, check out our automation reference guide for conditions and actions.
Once you've defined the criteria for your automation, there are two actions that will come in particularly handy, when building assignment automations:
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Conversation: Assignee — For any monitor or trigger you create, you can use this action to assign the conversation to an individual user. When you're building a trigger, you'll also have the '(Current User)' option. Selecting this option tells Kayako to assign the conversation to whoever performed the action that fired the trigger.
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Conversation: Team — Alternatively, you can simply change the team on the conversation, which will add it to that team's view, if you've defined one.
With these two actions, you can build all sorts of automatic routing to get the right conversations to the right people, super-fast. Read on for some examples of how to build assignment automations.
Example automations
Below are some examples of assignment triggers and monitors, which you can use to start routing your conversations automatically. Not only will this save you time, but it'll make it much easier to ensure that none of your conversations fall through the cracks.
If you need help with the basics of building automations, check out our instructions on how to create triggers and monitors and our automation reference guide for conditions and actions.
Auto-assigning Messenger conversations as they come in
Description: If you're offering real-time support with Kayako Messenger, it's useful to set up a trigger to auto-assign all your Messenger conversations team, right when they start. To do this, you'll create a trigger that will look for new Messenger conversations that don't have an assignee. That last part is important if you're proactively messaging customers, to make sure you're not inadvertently resetting assignments made by your engagement rules.
Definition:
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'Messenger'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversations Update Event: Conversation update event type', 'equal to', 'New conversation created', 'Conversation: Source', 'equal to', 'Messenger', 'Conversation: Assignee', 'equal to', '(Unassigned)'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Team', 'change', '[team handling real-time conversations]'
Assigning conversations based on their source channel
Description: Let's say you manage support at a relatively small company, and you've tasked one of your agents with handling the support requests that come in via Twitter. You can use a trigger to take any new conversation that comes in via Twitter and assign it directly to your social support staffer.
Definition:
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'Twitter', 'Any'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversations Update Event: Conversation update event type', 'equal to', 'New conversation created'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Assignee', 'change', '[name of your social support agent]'
Routing conversations according to their form
Description: Forms let you tailor the information you collect to suit to type of support request being submitted. You can use automations to build on that, by automatically routing new conversations that come into via a particular form to the team that is best equipped to handle it. For this example, let's say you have a dedicated Tech Support team that is responsible for handling any requests that come in via that 'Technical support request' or 'Reporting an error' form. This automation will instantly assign those conversations to the Tech Support team.
Definition:
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'Help Center'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversations: Form', 'equal to', ' Technical support request' OR 'Conversations: Form', 'equal to', 'Reporting an error' AND 'Conversations Update Event: Conversation update event type', 'equal to', 'New conversation created'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Team', 'change', 'Tech Support'
Prioritizing conversations with 'Urgent' in the subject line
Description: Say a customer writes in and the espresso machine they bought from you has broken down, just before a big coffee-tasting event they have scheduled. Their email subject line might read something like 'URGENT: Espresso machine is broken!'. Now, your support team might notice the subject line and jump on the conversation immediately — but we don't want to leave that to chance. We can build a trigger that will look for 'Urgent' in the email subject line and immediately assign the conversation to the team leader, so they can make sure it's taken care of. We'll also bump the conversation priority up to 'Urgent' for good measure.
Definition
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'Email'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversations: Subject', 'contains, 'urgent' AND 'Conversations Update Event: Conversation update event type', 'equal to', 'New conversation created'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Assignee', 'change to', 'Simon Diaz' AND 'Conversation: Priority', 'change', 'Urgent'
Sending conversations with a bad satisfaction rating to a review team
Description: No one likes to see bad ratings, but when they come in, it's useful to understand what happened. You can use an automation to take any conversation that receives a 'Bad' satisfaction rating, and send to a Conversation Review team for analysis.
Definition:
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'All'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversations: Satisfaction Rating', 'equal to', 'Bad'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Team', 'change', 'Conversation Review'
Preventing non-administrative users from changing assignments
Description: For more control over who makes your assignments, you can build an automation that will limit which users can assign conversations. Using the automation below, you can prevent any user without administrator access from changing a conversation's assignee, unless they're currently assigned to it.
Definition:
- Automation type — Trigger
- Channel Settings — 'All'
- Condition(s) — 'Conversation: Assignee', 'changed' AND 'Conversations update event: Current user role', 'not equal to', 'Admin', OR 'Conversations: Assignee', 'not equal to', '(Current User)'
- Actions — 'Conversation: Assignee', 'revert to original'
Kelly O'Brien