You can reduce your customers’ wait times by setting up time-based rules to automatically route messages to your team. If a message hasn’t been answered by your team after a set amount of time, you can escalate the message to a specific person, move it to a different inbox, or notify a team member using Teamchat or email.
Before you begin setting up escalation settings for your inboxes, we suggest creating user groups. User groups allow you to group your team members together no matter which locations they have access to or what their Podium role is. For example, all Sales team members across all locations could be members of the same user group. Once you’ve created a user group, you can assign that group to a specific inbox.
To create an escalation rule:
- Click More options next to the name of the inbox.
- Click Inbox Settings.
- Click Automations.
- The auto-assign setting will dictate how messages are distributed among your team once the message is escalated. To assign messages evenly across team members, click the toggle button.
- Click New Rule.
- Enter the number of minutes or hours you’d like to set for the escalation.
- Next, you have three options for escalating messages. Choose to assign the conversation to a specific person or next available user, move it to another inbox, or notify a team member using Teamchat or email. Details and about each of these options are outlined below.
Automatically Assigning Conversations
To assign the conversation to a specific person or the next available user, click Assign the conversation.
If you choose to assign to a specific person, select the person from the user menu. The user will be assigned the conversation even if they are not marked as available.
If you choose to assign to the next available user, the conversation will be routed to the team member who is marked as available and has had the longest amount of time elapsed since closing the last conversation. This option is not available unless you have enabled the auto-assign setting.
Moving Conversations to a Different Inbox
To move the conversation to a different inbox, click Move Inbox and select the inbox name from the inbox menu.
Once the conversation has been moved to the chosen inbox, it will be automatically assigned to the team member who is marked as available and has had the longest amount of time elapsed since closing the last conversation.
Notifying a Team Member of a Conversation
To send a notification to a user, click Notify a team member. Choose to send the notification using either Teamchat or email. If you’d like to send a notification through Teamchat, choose the group from the menu.
If you’d like to send an email notification, select the user from the user menu.
If you’d like the notification to be sent repeatedly until the next rule takes effect, click the toggle button. For example, if you’d like to send a notification to person A every 15 minutes while a message goes unanswered, and then escalate to person B after an hour has elapsed, you’d make two rules. The first rule would have 15 minutes set as the time parameter and person A chosen to be notified, and the second rule would have 1 hour set as the time parameter with person B chosen to be notified. Person A would receive three notifications before person B would receive their first notification.
Setting Assigned Conversation Rules
If you’ve enabled auto-assign, you can choose what happens to conversations when assigned team members become unavailable.
Select either unassign or leave assigned from the drop-down menu.
Choose to either unassign a conversation or leave the conversation assigned to a user when a conversation is closed. Auto-assign does not have to be enabled to configure this setting.
Click Save Inbox.