Routing setup flow

Setting up routing for your customer support team can be a challenge. With Inbox, we aim to make it easy for you.

How to set up a routing setup in your Inbox?

Imagine a software company called Company X that handles two types of issues: 

• Finance: payment failing, credit card issues, problems with charging, etc.

• Tech-Support (Bugs): login issues, website not loading, etc.

Company X operates in several markets, and thus has agents speaking 2 different languages:

• English

• Spanish

Company X does not want a Spanish customer asking a finance question, to be attended by a tech support agent in English. Based on that, Company X wants to make sure the following queues exist:

• English Finance

• English Tech Support (Bugs)

• Spanish Finance

• Spanish Tech Support (Bugs)

• Default Queue

Ready to get started? Let's add some tags with which tickets can be identified, and skills so the tickets are assigned to the right support agents. Inbox has languages built-in by default, thus we only need to add tags and skills. Let’s call them ‘payments’ for finance and ‘bugs’ for tech-support.

1. Go to your Inbox Settings and head to the ‘Tags’ page, by hitting ‘Settings’ from your navigation bar, and then ‘Tags’ from the sub-navigation:

2. Click on ‘Add tags‘ and it will open a modal to add new tags.

For our example, the first tag is ‘payments’. Then click on ‘+Add another tag’ and add the second tag - ‘bugs’. You can insert multiple tags and save them at the same time!

3. Ready? Hit ‘Add tags’. This will take you to an overview of your saved tags, it will look like this:

4. Now head to the ‘Skills’ page, by hitting ‘Skills’ from the sub-navigation:

5. Click on ‘Add skills‘ and it will open a modal to add new skills.

For our example, the first skill is ‘payments’. Then click on ‘+Add another skill’ and add the second skill - ‘bugs’. Just like with tags you can insert multiple skills and save them at the same time!

6. Hit ‘Add skills’. This will take you to an overview of your saved skills, it will look like this:

7. Great! Now we have all the tags and skills that we need. The next step is to add the team. Head to the ‘Agents’ page from the sub-navigation and click on ‘Add agent’. This will take you to the following modal:

Fill in the agent's first and last names, nickname (if they have one), role, and email address—this is very important, as it will be used to send them an invite to Inbox:

Ready? Continue filling in the ‘Languages’, ‘Skills’, and ‘Platforms’ for each team member:

Repeat the steps above for all the agents in your team, for all their different skills. The skill levels are optional, but they will help you distinguish between agents that more or less skilled in certain areas. This will allow you to assign tickets to those agents who can handle them best.

8. You’re ready to set up the queues. The queues for our example would be:

• English Finance

• English Tech Support (Bugs)

• Spanish Finance

• Spanish Tech Support (Bugs)

• Default Queue

9. Head to the ‘Routing’ page from the sub-navigation and click on ‘Advanced Routing’. You'll see a default queue that has already been created, leave it there—it will make sure all your agents are included in this queue, and it can be a queue towards which tickets get routed as a last resort.

10. Click on ‘Add queue’. You'll see the following modal:

11. Now let's create the first queue from our list, English Finance.

First enter the name that you want to use for this queue: 'English Finance'.

After giving it a name, it’s time to handle the 'Language' condition. Select Language ‘HAS’: English, with a level greater than 5 (to make sure the agents' level of English is good enough):

Let's get to Finance skills.

First, click ‘+Add responsibility’ to insert a second condition and follow the same process:

For the queue 'English Tech Support (Bugs) it will look like this:

Do the same for the other queues. The final result will look like this: 

12. Go to the ‘Routing’ tab. That's where we can make sure an incoming ticket will go through to the right queues, but also that it doesn't get stuck in a queue forever.

13. Click on ‘Add path’. That will open a form to be filled in. Here we can set up rules for the tickets.

By filling in it we make sure all tickets go to the right queue. For example, we cover all tickets coming in that are in English and concern Payment issues of any kind, go into the English Finance queue:

Regarding the time limit, we can set a timeout, for example, 30 seconds. This means that if a ticket is not picked up within 30 seconds, it will be moved onto the ‘Default’ queue. Make sure to set it up according to your business logic— depending on the ticket’s topic, you may want to make sure it's always picked up by the right agent, even if it takes a couple of hours longer.

Repeat the process for each combination of rules.

14. The last step is making sure the incoming tickets are tagged so the rules and paths we set up above work correctly.

To do that, head to ‘FlowBuilder’ in your Dashboard, and select the 'Inbox Flow' listed in ‘Your flows’ :

15. This will open the flow with the ‘Omnichannel’ step as the trigger of your flow and the ‘Create Inbox ticket’ step below:

16. Click on the plus sign 'Add step' (between the 'Omnichannel' and 'Create Inbox ticket' steps) and select the ‘Branch’ step. 

Now you can add multiple conditions for different keywords you would like to be recognized within the flow, such as 'payments', 'bugs' etc.

Then add a ‘Create Inbox Ticket’ step in each of those branches. It will look like this:

17. Click on each of the ‘Create Inbox Ticket’ steps to configure them, select the respective tags and press ‘Save’ when ready:

Fill this in for all branches. When you finish, press ‘Publish’ in the top-right corner of your screen and you're all set!

You can test your flow by sending messages and making sure they are routed to the right agents.

What happens then? When a customer reaches out to you, your flow will detect who is the right agent and will route that ticket accordingly. Now all your agents have to do is pick it up.