Chat Routing Overview
- Gnatta
- Jack Barmby
- Abbey Brown
Analytics
Quick links in this article:
This article will work through the steps to connect your new chat account to your agents - you’ll need to make sure you’ve completed all of the pre-cursor steps in this article first: After Adding a Channel
To proceed, you’ll need:
A chat account, with the code placed on your website: Adding Chat To Your Site
A team, with permissions enabled for your chat account: Manage Your Teams
At least one queue to store chats, assigned to your team: Queue Setup
Predefined custom data fields, with at least one Status field: Defining Custom Data
Routing options
In this article, we’re going to keep routing super simple by putting all chats into a single queue. However, that doesn’t mean you have to! You can use Workflow to split your inbound chats using information found in the pre-chat survey, if preferred. Here are some common examples:
Use reason for contact to split queries into queues for skill-based routing i.e. Ensure your Refunds team gets Refunds queries
Scan for potential fraud alerts based on keywords detected, and route to an Escalations team
Check for 3rd Party email addresses to route internal queries to a Back-Office team
If you’re keen to create a more dynamic routing plan, we’d recommend you follow the steps in this article before creating your routing flows: Create A Routing Plan
How routing works
Routing in Gnatta is controlled within the Workflow engine. In the briefest terms, you’ll need to do the following:
Define a
Chat StartedEvent - this tells Gnatta which chat account it needs to be listening toAdd a routing Flow - to create an interaction in the right queue, based on your routing criteria
Add a queued state Flow - this tells Gnatta you’re done automating and you want to give the interaction to an agent
To get started, navigate to Workflow as follows:
Create an event
First, you’ll need to create a ‘Chat Started’ event. This is the event you’ll be attaching your routing flows to. Select the name of your chat account and give your event a name.
Events must be unique. If you can’t define an event for a specific account, it likely already exists.
The stepper will offer you an opportunity to add flows - but as we haven’t created them yet, save your new event. It’ll appear in the list on the left at the bottom, or you can search and filter the list to locate it.
Add a routing flow
Now that you’ve created your event, you need to attach some Flows. Flows tell Gnatta what to do when that event occurs. The first flow is going to be a routing flow.
From the Events tab, switch to Flows and click Add Flow. Then browse the templates to find ‘New Chat Create’ - you can create a Flow from scratch, but this one has some useful notes that might help you get started!
The first (and right now, only!) action in this flow is Create Interaction. With this action, we want to achieve several things:
Create an interaction to store the chat conversation in
Decide which dataset to show to agents who receive the chat
Tell Gnatta which queue that interaction should be added to
Log data from the pre-chat survey against the interaction
We’re going to leave the interaction state as created at this point, so we can Queue it in a separate flow. This makes it easier to add more flows at a later stage, after the interaction has been created but before it reaches an agent!
First - set the dataset and queue according to your routing plan.
Next, we’re going to log the data from the pre-chat survey. By default, survey data is stored against the chat conversation - but we want to store it on the interaction so it’s visible if the customer gets in touch again (via chat, or a different channel). To do this:
Select Preset data
Identify the custom field you want to Preset - in our example, we want to set Phone Number
Use the ‘Explore’ menu to find Chat Data, and select the custom field you’re copying from. In our example, we want to copy the Phone Number value from the chat
Save the action
When you first select your custom field on Preset data, you’re just telling Gnatta which field you want to update - you’ll need to click Explore to tell Gnatta what you want to update it with!
Optionally, we can now think about adding a welcome message to send customers when they first connect to a chat. If you’d like to do that, go ahead and click ‘Submit’ on your Create Interaction action, and then add a new action. You’re looking for Send Autoresponse in the actions list.
Once you’ve given your Flow a name (click on ‘Untitled’ in the header bar), you can use File>Save and File>Publish to publish your flow.
Your routing flow is now ready to be attached to your Chat Started event. Return to the Events tab in Workflow, find your event, and attach your new routing flow.
But don’t stop here - you still need to change the interaction state to queued.
Add queueing flow
Because your routing flow should’ve created interactions in a Created state (to protect your automations from being interrupted), chats won’t yet be assigned to an agent, even though they’re on a queue. Only interactions in a Queued state will be assigned to an agent.
To set the state to Queued, return to the flow builder and create a new flow from the Template: Queue Interaction. This super simple template is just one preconfigured action, designed to set the state of the interaction to Queued. Just save and publish the flow, no edits needed.
Interaction State is not the same as a custom Status field that you might’ve created in previous steps. State is how Gnatta determines what to do with the interaction. Status is how an agent closes the interaction and removes it from their radar.
Find out more here: Interaction State vs Status Fields.
Once you’ve given the flow a name, save and publish it. Then you can add it to your event, ensuring it is placed after your routing flow.
Because the Queue Interaction flow is so simple, you can use it on multiple events! You’ll only need to create this one once.
And that’s it! You’re all done. This is what will happen:
Gnatta will listen for new chats initiated by the account you’ve specified on the event
Your routing flow will be triggered first, creating interactions and sending an autoresponse
Your queuing flow will tell Gnatta the interaction is ready to be assigned to the team
Gnatta will assign the interaction to an available agent from the team mapped to the queue
What’s next?
If you’ve followed all of the knowledgebase setup articles in order, you should now have a functioning contact centre - conversations are coming into Gnatta and being created into interactions, then they’re being assigned to queues and routed to agents. Completely handsfree.
Agents not receiving interactions as expected? Troubleshooting Assignation
But - don’t stop here! Gnatta is full of cool customisation options that can take your contact centre to the next level.