How Foqal does Conversation Routing Right

When your customer asks a question, there are often many factors to determine where a conversation should be routed. These factors will depend on what they are asking, who the requester is, time of day, holidays, severity of a request, what other requests are in the queue, what pricing tier the customer is bought into, etc. At the same time, the workflow has to be dead simple for the customer, they should never have to repeat themselves, and they should not need to just remember anything to create a request.

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Thinking about routing

If you are thinking about upgrading your Slack Support, here are some things to think about with conversation routing.

1. Other than support, who else is in the channel? CSM’s? Marketing? Account Executives (AE)? Founders?
2. When a message comes from your customer, which team should triage that message? Support is usually better staffed for this, however you don’t want to overload support with questions that should be answered by CSM or AEs, and you want to allow your CSM’s to establish a relationship with the customer.
3. How do you prevent noise caused by outbound updates from Marketing or AE?
4. How do you get visibility if you have 100s of customer channels?
5. How should a customer bring attention to the problem in the case of an emergency?

Routing with Foqal

The following is our recommended approach in how you can use Foqal to support the goals above and give your customers the best possible support interaction.

1. Install the Foqal Agent bot in all you customer channels.

2. Remove all employees from the customer channels. This is usually the hardest part. Craft a message to explain the change to support. We found most customers appreciate telling them you are using Foqal to ensure their requests in Slack are not getting forgotten. We also found customers do not feel like the interactions are any less personal through the Foqal System.

3. Use Foqal Tag automations to set up the following:

1. When a request comes in, look up the assigned CSM for an account and their hours of operation. You can store CSM assignments in a CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot or directly in Foqal automations.
2. Use the “Hours of Operation” task to see if a CSM is active and the request is within their hours of operations. If it is, route and assign the request directly to them using the “Assign to User” task. If the CSM is inactive, route straight to support using the “Add to Queue” task.
3. When routing to the CSM, set up a schedule using the “Schedule” Task. If the CSM does no respond when the schedule expires, send the request to support.
4. Within the support queue, set up Round Robin. This will ensure tickets are routed equally between support agents.
5. Once the request is with support, use the “Set SLA” task to configure an SLA for the request depending on the customer tier.
6. Use the “On SLA Breach” trigger to fire an action if the request is not responded within the SLA time allowed. The trigger could just send a message to a manager, or use an external service such as Pager Duty to find a relevant on-call.

4. For customer emergencies, set up an emergency request type. This request type should ask questions about the nature of the emergency, then be configured around your escalation path. Add this request type into the channel so the option to report an emergency appears when they create a request.

At Foqal we use Pager Duty. When an emergency is reported, Foqal automation will create an incident in Pager Duty which will notify our available on-call in the Pager Duty application, SMS, and/or phone calls.

5. Instead of sending messages directly in the channels, allow Marketing, CSMs, and AE’s to use the Compose Message feature in Foqal Agent. This allows these teams to send messages to a single customer or in bulk, while staying in the Foqal System.

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In Closing...

If you look at the recommendations above, all of this automations are completed once a customer sends a very simple message. For the customer, additional education required to allow them to create a simple request to their CSM or support in a normal or emergency situation. With Foqal Agent - this is easy for the customer and easy for your team.

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