Continuity can be an important tool when providing customer service, reducing the number of times a customer has to explain their situation can give them, and your agents, a better experience.
LeadDesk provides several options for maintaining continuity of service, for both the progress of the conversation through the system (in the case of sessions), or linking the customer and an agent (in the case of contact ownership and reply routing).
This article describes these features.
Sessions
Sessions do not specifically link the contact to an agent. Instead, a session is used to maintain continuity of the contact's journey through the system as a whole. For example, if you have created a menu using the flow tool, when the customer replies to the menu, it is the session that ensures the customer continues on from the menu, instead of going back to the start of the process again.
Sessions are not generally visible to the user, and are largely used behind the scenes to keep the messages flowing correctly. However, some reports do refer to them, for example the Inbound assignment messages report.
- Start: A new session is created when a conversation with a customer begins - when the first email arrives from the customer, for example, or when they send their first webchat message of the conversation.
- Stop: Sessions normally end when the agent assigns a call ending reason to that conversation. When creating a call ending reason, the checkbox Call ending reason keeps the conversation active will keep the session active, as will using the Redirect messages to a flow option.
Contact ownership/Preferred agent status
Referred to as "ownership" in the application, it is actually better think of this as a preference. It is a link between a contact and a specific agent. If the customer contacts your service a second time while the preferred agent status is still active (that is to say, during the ownership length), LeadDesk will try to connect the contact to the same agent again.
If the preferred agent is not available for any reason, the customer's new communication will be offered to a different agent.
If you prefer not to use contact ownership for your call queues, it can be switched off completely in the queue settings. In the Optional settings for a call queue, click to untick Return callers to the agents who last spoke with them checkbox.
- Start: Preferred agent status is established when an agent first interacts with a customer, regardless of channel.
- Stop: The preferred agent status lasts for a number of hours, which can be defined in each project's settings. Set the Ownership length to determine how long a particular agent would be preferred. If the preferred agent is not available, the customer will be connected to a new agent, and ownership will be transferred to that second agent.
Reply routing
If you have access to advanced flows in the flow tool, you can use the Reply routing applet to extend the continuity between customer and agent even further. While reply routing does not create a link, as such, it is able to check the contact's history to see if there are previous calls. This applet is only available for call flows.
You can use the Reply routing applet before the Queue applet to check whether the customer has spoken to an agent within the last 30 days. If so, the applet will try to offer the call to the agent, ignoring normal queue logic. If the customer has not spoken to an agent within that period, or if the agent is offline or unavailable, you can choose what happens instead, most likely defaulting back to the normal queue.