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How can we better deal with 'reassigned' conversations on round robin?

  • 28 April 2021
  • 6 replies
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U

We use round robin, which works well generally for us (doing live chat, ~2/3 min response times), but a pain point is that when team members go on 'away' & 'reassign' modes, reassigned conversations go into the generic team inbox rather than being assigned to an individual within the team. This means my team have to constantly keep an eye out for a little '1' on the team inbox number, which is frustrating and it's easy for things to get missed!

 

Would love for them to just be assigned to a member of the team who is online, in the same round robin style and am not quite sure I understand why you'd want it to be assigned to the generic team... Or is there something I've missed?! Have spoken to the support team about this a couple of times over the last year and they've said there isn't a way to do it, so just wondering what others do!

 

Thanks! 🙂

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Best answer by Eric Fitz 29 April 2021, 13:12

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Hello @user493​ 👋, Welcome to Interconnect ✨

 

I just test this out and you are totally right. Once team member is away + reassigned round robin conversations are stacking in team inbox.

 

This feedback should go to @Intercom Bug Reports​ group.

 

Workaround here will be to use Balance assignment rule, instead of round robin.

 

I hope this will be helpful.

U

Hi there! Thanks for this 🙂

 

Are we sure it's a bug? As I said I did have it confirmed that was how it was meant to work from the Intercom support team but I just wondered if there had been any changes recently or ways around it 🙂

 

I'm a bit puzzled about how the Balance assignment rule works any better though, given I thought this was just reassignment of new conversations? Is there something extra it does specifically on reassign? We don't currently have that premium tier so it's not really an option at the moment sadly (but if we could guarantee it does it then that makes things more interesting!)

 

Vicky

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@user493​ , If this is normal behavior, it's definitely wrong.

 

When balance assignment is turned on, conversations will be assigned to teammate with the few open conversation first.

Balance assignment works on Away + reassigned status.

 

Eric Fitz
Userlevel 1

Hey @user493​, to clarify, this is expected behaviour - when a teammate turns on away mode & reassign replies, any conversation previously assigned through round robin will be reassigned back to your team's default inbox (which can be defined at the very bottom of the Rules page).

 

As @roy s11​ mentioned, the balanced workload feature would resolve your issue here, but it's not part of your current price plan, and I totally accept that it's not always worth it to jump just for one feature!

 

One thing that we found useful in my Intercom Support days, before the development of the balanced workload feature, was having one teammate, or a group of teammates, responsible for "sweeping" inboxes. "Sweeping" involves periodically checking these inboxes and manually reassigning any conversations that have been put back in your default inbox through away/reassign. This may not necessarily work for your team and their workflows, but I wanted to share some insight into how we would handle it internally in Intercom, and I'm happy to chat about this in more detail!

 

Can I ask, also, how you use the reassign replies feature? We typically only use it for when a teammate is on leave or sick, but I'm curious to learn how your team implement it.

U

Ah, thanks so much for this clarification @eric f11​  - I thought that's what I'd been told!

 

That's really interesting, I'll be taking a look at that 🙂

 

In terms of how we use Reassign, given we provide real-time live chat, we use it regularly for e.g. lunch breaks, meetings and just the end of shift/end of day so that someone else can pick up conversations if the user comes back and things aren't wrapped up yet. Passing chats is pretty common for us if the conversation goes on longer than a quick resolution or the user has lots of questions.

 

It's why I mentioned that we're on 2/3 minute response times because that's what makes this issue particularly painful - we need to keep a constant eye on that team inbox as we want to grab it the minute it goes in there! Where possible we encourage the team to assign conversations manually if they're ongoing in that second but this isn't always possible or a user might reopen an old conversation.

 

Hope that's useful context!

Eric Fitz
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Yep, super useful context @user493​! I suspect that you might use reassign in those circumstances due to the rapid nature of your reply times.

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