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How would you like to categorise your conversations beyond Open/Closed/Snoozed? (Question from an Intercom product designer)

  • 27 January 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 147 views
J

Hiya 👋 I’m Josh, a product designer here at Intercom. I was hoping to find out whether any of you are finding our existing conversation statuses (open/snoozed/closed) limiting in any way.

 

Are there enough statuses?

 

Do the current statuses not quite work the way you’d like them to?

 

Do these limitations affect your teammates or managers more?

 

What would make them more useful and why? 

 

Any insight into how it affects your workflow would be amazing 🙇‍♂️

 

@Product Wishlist​ 

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Best answer by Nathan Sudds 27 January 2021, 20:43

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Nathan Sudds
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@joshua d Djuric​ This feels like it would be better as a screensharing call but I'll give you a bit of an answer... I don't know if I want more categories as much as I would like more control over the search results personally.

 

  1. Unsnoozed (probably not the right term but it could be "Reopened" I guess but that's not as fun plus something could be Reopened by a user replying but this category of things coming back from snooze are a bit different 🙂
  2. Tags as Categories or Labels? Might be helpful if you could drop down and filter the inbox by certain tags or variables. Yes, we've got views but you have to configure them and get no preview of what you'll see plus you don't always need a view it might just be something you want to see temporarily.
  3. Sort Order - Some way to see the inbox based on time the message was sent not the time some other action was taken on it. There's "waiting the longest" but nothing equivalent for "waiting the shortest" to see things that are new if new action have been taking on something older it will show up as 'newest".
  4. Filters - Like other areas of the app which allows you to create some very tailored views of contacts for example vs search which is less robust

 

Does this help at all, I think only #1 is related to your question directly, my apologies if the rest aren't helpful to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nathan Sudds, Consultant / activelabs.ca
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To add some traditional thoughts re: Status

  1. Resolved (we think it is fixed) versus Closed (the customer thinks it is fixed)
  2. Snoozed (customer is gone and we need them to come back) versus On Hold (we need to do something and come back to it)
  3. Open (it exists) versus Acknowledged versus In Progress
  4. Escalated would be useful

 

So on 1, right now we close a conversation and the customer responds it is Open (unless we set the Close After x days rule) - would make more sense that it is in a pre-closed status, and then if there is no response or changes it then closes. Really the only person who should close a conversation and say it is done is the customer (or your system rules).

 

So on 2, we need to be able to split out we are hiding a conversation as the customer is busy, not responsive, finding out more info etc versus we are investigating or finding out things and will come back to it - snooze is more, hide this convo till later versus a status right now. Further to this, having Hold Reasons makes a tonne of sense if you are tracking SLAs heavily. An SLA clock should stop if the action is with the customer, it should count if the action is with the Service Provider.

 

So on 3, conversation is open but teammate has not really done anything or started engaging. Once they take the conversation, greet customer and engage it is clearly acknowledged then once they start working on it its in progress - I have always felt we need something between Open and Closed to show something is being worked on (In Progress) or not (On Hold with snooze functionality).

 

So on 4, it could / should be an extension of On Hold but often you need to leave chat and get the brains or boss types in the mix - how do we track that beyond snooze? In our Service tool we use On Hold with a Hold Reason to track that but a status reflecting it is no longer active in the hands of front line teams would be key

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Further to the above, how is this an impact at the Enterprise level;

  1. Not having robust status and workflows on these, means the SLAs are not really useful or relevant
  2. Grooming/managing backlog is really just a look at Snoozed/Recently closed with out really knowing what is moving or not beyond it not being active
  3. If you are using other tools to manage case lifecycle, there is no alignment between Intercom and said tools as you really have Open or Closed to track work

 

So it can put limits on how much work you assign and how you can workforce plan due to these limitations.

Nathan Sudds
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+100 to everything @craig​ said.

 

This would make the Inbox so much more useful

 

Also that second #3 about other tools is really a thing all on it's own! We use other tools and for example @user649​  and team have created an integration with Clubhouse.io which moves things automatically from one category to another in Userfeed when we move it in Clubhouse. So if I delegate it to engineering and they resolve the issue, it automatically moves to Completed in Userfeed. Saving a lot of extra energy and keeping everything up to date.

 

 

Nathan Sudds, Consultant / activelabs.ca
B

Newbie here!  We would find “In Progress” a useful status. Not everything can be resolved immediately and it would be helpful to filter out items that have been responded to and are In Progress.  I know we can convert the conversation into a “Ticket” and assign In Progress, but that doesn’t pull through to the main Inbox.  There may be a better/another way to accomplish?  

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