5 chat flow automations to supercharge your customer engagement

Automate tasks like resolving, assigning or responding to chats using the Advanced Automation Marketplace app so you can spend more time engaging with your customers and less time worrying about handling procedures.

What is the advanced automations app?

Advanced Automations is an app you can install from the Freshchat marketplace to create chat workflows which help you automate tasks that otherwise will take up your valuable time.

Maintaining SLAs during these unprecedented times can be tough sometimes. There is an increase in the number of online queries and your agents are now working with reduced capabilities. Therefore agents can easily feel overwhelmed and fail to meet their SLAs. This is where apps like Advanced Automations can help.

Using the Advanced Automations app, you can free up their bandwidth and enable them to take more chats with ease by configuring the following chat flow automations.

1. Configure an autoresponder

Increased workloads have stretched agents to their capacity and are now handling more chats than they are used to. This leads to longer response times and leaves your customers wondering if their query will ever be answered. You can mitigate this by configuring an autoresponder which assures your customers that help is on its way when the agent is taking longer than usual to respond to the customer.

Here’s how you configure this

Additionally, you can also use Autoresponder to send your Terms and Conditions or updated SLAs when they are routed to a particular group and get their consent before initiating a chat.

2. Create a chat rescue

As people started working remotely, device and network related issues have increased by many folds. When this happens, the agent is unable to reach their inbox and all the chats are left waiting for a reply that will take a long time to come. By setting up a chat rescue, you can ensure that these chats do not go unattended. A chat rescue automatically reassigns a conversation to a different agent or group, when the chat is active but no agent has replied to it for some time.

The configuration for this is as following:

3. Setup chat overflow

Chat overflow is a custom routing engine that works in tandem with Assignment Rules. When all the agents of the group the chat is assigned to are preoccupied, this chat will ignore the assignment rules and be routed to an available agent.

An example where this could be used is when all the agents handling chats from VIP customers are already busy, the overflow app can be set up to automatically route this chat to any available agent instead and give them heads up by also adding a private note.

To set up chat overflow, you need to first create a group containing all agents, then, using Advanced Automations, create the following rule

4. Nudge customers to reply

When a support conversation takes a long time, customers tend to wander off and miss your reply. To get their attention again, you can automatically send a follow-up message asking them to respond. Furthermore, you can also auto-resolve this conversation if there is no response even after that.

Use the following rules to set this up:

5. Auto-resolve chats based on keywords

Being thanked by your customers for your efforts is a really good feeling and that is what makes our jobs feel thankful. But when this show of gratitude reopens a conversation, it does more harm than good. You can configure a workflow, where messages from customers saying “Thank You”, will automatically be closed.

Here is how this can be configured,