How Foqal does Conversation Routing Right

Highlight how people route tickets. Talk about iterable use messaging based on hours of operation of each individual agent. It's a good balance between building a relationship with an individual named agent and making sure there is coverage around the clock.

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.

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:
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.

1. 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.

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.

Customer Example

When [EMPLOYEE] from [CUSTOMER] came to us, [SHE] told us they have a very specific workflow.

1. Support depends on the customers tier.
2. Because we want our customers to establish great relationships with our team, we want requests to go to a specific agent by default.
3. If that agent is away or on vacation, it should go to a backup agent.
4. If the request comes in after hours, it should go to the global support center.
5. However the global support center is not 24/7, so if the request comes in after those hours, it should be sent to a ticket and a custom message should go to the customer with options for emergencies.

And this process doesn’t even include escalations and L2 support.

With Foqal tag automations [EMPLOYEE] was easily able to achieve all of this. First [SHE] grouped the channels by the assigned agent and applied an automation to each group. This automation would look at the hours of operation of the assigned agent, their holiday schedule, the global support schedule and take one of 3 actions. If the agent was available, the bot would allow the agent to respond. If the agent was unavailable, the automation would either route the request to the global support or notify the customer about hours of operation and provide them a path for emergencies. If an agent ever needs to take a personal day, they simply flip a switch in the workflow, and this logic automatically routes requests to the assigned backup.