Offer custom chatbot experiences to your visitors based on agent availability.

It's important to balance the need to meet customer expectations while offering your support teams flexibility to work effectively. You can Integrate your Zendesk account with Insent and enable your customers to create support tickets and search your knowledge base from the Insent chat widget on your website. 

But what about your support teams? Don’t worry; we’ve got them covered too. You can set up and perform complex support hand-offs on Insent by configuring advanced routing options in the ‘Connect to Agent step’ and handling support requests outside your office hours entirely through the Bot.

PS: We also have a few suggestions on improving your support team’s workflow using Insent in this article. 

At the end of this article, you will be able to:

• Improve your support coverage through a combination of bot and agent conversations.
• Find out how you can deflect low hanging support cases that don’t require an agent connection by sharing a knowledge base article.
• Build the capability to offer async support through the bot in-case support requests pop up outside office hours 

Connecting to an agent in Insent

The ‘Connect to an agent’ step allows visitors to connect to agents in your organization. You can choose to send connection requests to specific agents within Insent Inbox, Slack, or MS Teams or notify a particular team.

‘Connect to an Agent’ step. 

What you can configure in the Connect to agent step:

1. Where to send alerts: Choose between Inbox, Slack, or MS Teams.
2. Whom to send alerts: Notify specific individual(s), All users, Specific Team(s), Salesforce Account owner, Salesforce contact owner, Hubspot Account Owner, Hubspot Contact Owner. 
3. The number of users to be alerted at the same time. 
4. Wait time between two consecutive alerts (in seconds)
5. Execution time for the step

The ‘Connect to an agent’ step has two modes of execution (Advanced options in a ‘Connect to agent’ step):

• Wait for agent response: This option pauses the execution of the conversation steps for the duration of the step’s execution time. If the agent is not connected for this duration, the next steps are executed.
• Don’t wait for agent response: This option allows you to send out a parallel connection request to agents while continuing the conversation’s execution.

Note: You can set up ‘Conditions’ in a step to control the execution of a step based on particular criteria being met.

We discuss how you can configure fail-safes and proactive support experiences for your visitors later in this article.

You can string ‘routing steps’ to set up advanced routing rules. Setting up Advanced routing helps you automate complex account hand-offs based on agent availability and allows your team to focus only on responding to inbound requests.

A complex routing configuration that you can setup could look like this:

1. Send a connection request to the Hubspot account owner and the Support Team A
2. Wait for 30 seconds
3. Then Send a follow-on connection request to Support team B
4. Then wait for 15 seconds.
5. If nobody accepts the connection request, alert all available agents with the @here message in Slack’s specific channel.

Routing based on the availability of agents

Insent's backup bot is designed to navigate the barrage of inbound requests when your agents are unavailable. 

With ‘Office hours’ in Insent, we ensure that your agents don't get disturbed after work. At the same time, we give your prospects a red carpet experience and the ability to schedule time with your team through the Native calendar integration. 

Office hours will enable you to control when alerts are sent to your agents. 

With the office hours in place, you will control when you can send alerts to the agents. You can set up office hours globally (for your organization) and at a team level. 

Outside office hours, the platform will not send the 'Agent connection' requests. Instead, the platform will redirect the path to the backup path, where the bot takes over. 

Setup Office hours for your organization from the ‘Widget Settings’

Note: You can also set up office hours for a specific team. The team-based office hours will override the default office hours in the widget settings for individuals in a team.

Setup Office hours for your team.