Answered by whoever is free.
Messages land in the same inbox as your email and your web chat, routed by your own rules and shared out in turn. The customer's deals, invoices and past conversations sit beside the thread, so nobody has to ask who this is.
Beside every conversation
- Who they areThe contact, and the company behind them
- What they are buyingOpen deals and their stage
- What they oweInvoices, paid and outstanding
- What was said beforeEmail, web chat and calls, on one timeline
Getting it to the right person
Four things decide who answers.
All of them yours to set, and none of them requiring anybody to watch a phone.
Route by your own rules.
Send a message to the department that should have it based on the number it came to, what it says, or who it is from. A supplier chasing a payment reaches Finance without somebody forwarding it.
What a rule can look at
- Which number they messagedRun more than one, for more than one team
- What the message saysWords you choose, in the language you use
- Who they already areAn existing customer goes to the team that owns them
Shared out in turn, not grabbed.
New conversations go round the people on duty one after another, so the same person is not carrying the whole queue and nobody quietly stops answering.
How it is shared
- In turnThe next conversation goes to the next person
- Only who is onOff duty or on leave, and they are skipped
- ClaimableAnyone can pick one up, and it shows who has
Working hours, and what happens outside them.
Set the hours each team answers. Outside them the assistant replies,says when a person will be back, and leaves the conversation waiting rather than closing it.
Out of hours
- Somebody answersRather than silence until the morning
- It says whenAn honest time, not "shortly"
- Still waitingFirst thing, it is at the top of the queue
Words that raise a ticket.
Choose the words that mean something has gone wrong. When one appears, the conversationbecomes a support ticket automatically, with its own owner and its own clock.
When it escalates
- Your wordsComplaint, refund, broken, whatever your business uses
- Becomes a ticketWith an owner and a response time
- Same conversationThe customer never gets asked to start again
Link a conversation to the deal it is about.
Attach a thread to a deal, a contact or a ticket and it stays on that record for good. Somebody picking the account up in a year sees what was agreed on WhatsApp, not just what made it into a CRM note.
Once it is linked
- On the timelineBeside the emails and the calls
- Found in searchWhat was said is searchable with everything else
- KeptEven when the person who answered has left