Table of Contents

Routing

Neelke Stadler Updated by Neelke Stadler

A great conductor gets 50 musicians to create one magical melody. The routing engine does that for your team - a group effort to help people!

It is great when someone helps you in time. The routing engine makes sure people who need help get help from operators who are available. Amazing! Let's dive in.

What is a routing engine?

In a hospital incoming patients are triaged based on the urgency and critical nature of their condition. Think of the routing engine as that behind-the-scenes logic that looks at who needs help, and then assigns chats between team members so that people are helped timely.

How does the routing engine distribute chats between people?

The routing engine checks which chats need help, which operators are available, and who can take on more chats. It distributes chats between available operators based on their capacity.

The following is taken into account for your number:

  1. All open, but unassigned chats.
  2. All operators that are set to "Available".
  3. The number of chats already assigned to an operator.

How is "capacity" defined?

You can define how many chats will be automatically assigned to operators at a time. They can have more chats assigned than the number defined in Settings if those are assigned manually. Once they have more than the limit of open chats assigned, no new chats will be automatically routed to them.

Once a chat is closed or unassigned and they are below your limit, chats will again be automatically assigned to that operator.

What is the chat queue? Can I see it somewhere?

As people interact with your service there will be chats that need help. The routing engine will queue all open and unassigned chats, and from the queue assign chats as your team becomes available and have capacity. You are not able to see the queue because the engine takes care of it on your behalf.

Operator's Availability

What happens when I change the availability toggle? What happens to my inbox when I end my shift and become unavailable?

Anyone working on a helpdesk shift can set themselves to available to indicate that chats should be automatically assigned to them.

  • When an operator sets themselves to Available: They will automatically be assigned chats from the queue if they have capacity.
  • When an operator sets themselves to Unavailable: They can choose whether or not to release their chats. If they chose to keep their chats, the chats will stay assigned to them. If they chose to release their chats, these chats will be assigned to other available operators.

Automatically pause journeys during operator handovers

Before, when you routed a conversation to an operator, journeys would stay active until an operator replied.

Now, we've introduced a setting that enables you to automatically pause journeys as soon as a conversation is routed to an operator.

You can also set how long journeys get paused for. Before, it used to be a fixed 15 minutes. However, that often wasn't enough time for an operator to reply — which caused users to accidentally trigger journeys while they were waiting. Now, you can set whatever time makes sense for you.

Automatically close journey chats after they're done

Before, we used to keep automated journeys chats open, even after users were done. This made it really difficult to find conversations that needed human help.

Now, we introduced a new setting that lets you automatically close journey chats that don't need human help. Conversations that went through the Route to operator block remain open, as those require human help.

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