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Routing: Automatic chat distribution

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 to set up

1. Enable Routing in the settings

Simple head to Settings > Inbox & Routing and then Enable routing

Here, you can also configure the maximum conversations each operator can have at the same time. When that limit is hit, we stop routing new conversations to that person and they stay waiting in the queue.

2. Route to an operator on your Journeys

At the point where you want to escalate the conversation to a person, simply add this card to your Journeys:

If you want to route 100% of conversations to people and not use automations, simply:

  1. create a single Journey with a Catch All trigger (anytime your users message, they'll get sent to this journey)
  2. Add the Route to Operator card
3. That's it!

Now, all your operators need to do is to set themselves as available to start receiving conversations:

In the background, Turn is now routing conversations to the best available operator:

If no one is available/everyone is at full capacity, we'll keep people in the queue until someone is available. You can also easily see who's waiting for help (in the queue) or being helped (already assigned to someone):

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.
Seeing who's online

To improve collaboration and visibility on what your teammates are doing, you can also see who's available and which conversations are assigned to them:

Advanced configuration

Pause journeys during operator handovers

Sometimes, when you route a conversation to an operator, you want to pause all automated journeys, so that the user stays waiting for a person instead of interacting with your automations.

In that case, simply flip on the switch above.

You can also set a timer to automatically resume journeys again, so that, in case you're experiencing a high volume of support and can't quickly help users, users can interact with journeys after a certain period of time (60 minutes by default).

Keep your inbox clean

So that your Inbox only has conversations that require an operator, we recommend you automatically close chats that only touch journeys. This lets your operator focus on the conversations that really need help.

Simply head to Settings > Journeys and enable "Automatically close chats after the journey ends".

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