Love them or hate them, there’s one thing that everyone can agree on: helpdesk automations are incredibly useful.
We rely on them to keep organized, on track, and productively chipping away at our workloads. But we know they can do more than that.
When implemented the right way, automations can transform your support team into proactive customer advocates.
Join Kayako’s Customer Support Advocates Sandeep Kaur and Daniel Harris as they walk you through:
- What’s possible with powerful automation
- 3 best practices for delivering better customer service
- How to build your own automation strategy
Webinar: Scaling Your Customer Service with Top Notch Automation
Transcript: Scaling Your Customer Service with Top Notch Automation
A – Alicia
S – Sandeep
D – Daniel
A – Hello and welcome to today’s webinar. We’ve got a stellar presentation for you, and first I’d like to let you know a little bit about who we are. Kayako is the platform for a unified customer service experience. Every day our team is driven by the idea that we want to help our customers to use Kayako to deliver better customer service experiences out into the world. We built Kayako around the premise that if your internal teams are really gelled together, if your relationships with your customers are personal and positive, and you’re actually delivering the support experiences that your customers are looking for, or searching for, then you can actually transform your support team into a competitive advantage for your business.
So first things first, I’d like to introduce my colleagues Sandeep Kaur and Daniel Harris. We’ll be taking you through our automation presentation today, if you want to give a quick hello to our audience.
S – This is Sandeep, I’m a customer service advocate and customer service is what I take all the pleasure in.
– and Daniel?
D – I’m Daniel Harris, customer support advocate. I’m very excited to be sharing our new product today. It’s designed with efficiency and productivity in mind, and I think that’s what we’re all here for, so I’m really looking forward to it.
– Thanks, so there’s a of couple things to note, we have included some time for live Q&A that Daniel is going to guide us through at the end, so please, throughout the presentation use the questions section on your GoToWebinar panel so we’re able to cover those at the end. We’re also recording this, so if you need to hop off, we will hold back our tears and email out the links after, so you should be all set.
Today we’re talking about automation, and we’re going to cover some common customer pin points that we are hearing from our Kayako customers and the audience right now. What’s possible when automation is implemented the right way, the top three best practices that we think you can use for creating better customer service experiences, and then how to use that to build your own automation strategy. We’ll finish up with the live Q&A at the end.
We did some digging, and we sourced three of the top pin points that we’re hearing from our customers, and the first revolves around the struggle in working together within internal teams. Support managers spend a lot of their time managing, answering questions, assigning cases, making sure the wheels continue to turn day in and day out. I think this is a great example because of how common this struggle is, I think it really represents your typical support team operating with a reactionary approach to customer service and to their customers. Related to that our second pin point revolves around your support team’s external relationships with your customers. It’s really easy for businesses to say, ‘we’re customer centric, we always put our customers first’, but it’s a whole different ball game to show it and to prove it day in and day out and to have that be woven I guess maybe into the fabric of how your team operates. At the end of the day, there’s nothing more important than that, than the relationships with your customers, both from a human perspective where everyone’s happy, but from a business standpoint as well e.g. from a perspective of revenue and turn, and that’s where the competitive advantage bit comes in.
Our third pin point might sound familiar to you, it has to do with support metrics being maybe not where they should be, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that perhaps you are not delivering the right customer service to your specific people, to your audience. You may think you have all of the right elements in place e.g. you’re following everything you read in the industry, but at the end of the day, are your customer’s experiences effortless? Is it frictionless, and is it intuitive enough that both your team and your customer know what needs to happen next without really having to think about it? This is what we mean when we talk about going beyond delight in a lot of the content that we’re pushing out right now at Kayako. Customers value simple and easy so much more than they do more singular moments of ‘wow’ and making that shift to a self-service model is super important for modern businesses regardless of industry and vertical to stay competitive.
So what is possible with powerful automation? These are a few things that we’ve put together. You can save time, of course, by optimizing response and resolution times. You can lose productivity by sending reminder emails and notifications. You can answer customers faster with assigning cases automatically, and you can free up time for your team to focus on helping customers with really honed, fine-tuned automated case emails. That’s going to give you a lot of control over your end and workflow, so that you can better identify those weak points and optimize there, instead of just approaching the whole thing as a blanket problem, or opportunity, it depends on how you look at your glass! So, these are actually things that we have done internally at Kayako, and we’ve seen really great results just from these items that you see right here. We have improved our response time by 75%. That was a shift from a four hour response time to two and a half hours. We’ve also improved our CSAT score, and these are pretty standard benchmarks of success for support teams in the industry. It really just helps to have those healthy numbers to vacuum up in terms of getting scale and making sure that support has a seat at that table in making more strategic business decisions.
So the opposite of that, what is the cost of doing nothing? We think the cost is accepting business as usual and accepting that the pin points that we just went over are an inevitable part of reality and that you have no control over it. That type of thinking is going to really hinder your ability to transform customer service into the competitive advantage as I said many times as you scale.
So now without further ado, I would love to turn it over to Sandeep, who’s going to walk you through our top three best practices for transforming your team into proactive customer advocates.
S – So we’re going to talk about automations. I’m going to start by giving you a little background as an understanding. So, let’s say you’re using a normal email client and then you’re using a helpdesk and, if you’re not really exploiting the opportunity to go through many things, you ask it as using an email client where you are spending a lot of time, or your team is spending a lot of time unconsciously or unknowingly sifting through the cases as a request which comes in. So whereas automations can help you save a lot of time, in that case, and also it could be that you have lots of requests coming in where they have to be sent across teams and you spend a lot of time because your team has to open a case, look through it and understand the query and then pass it on to a different team. So in that case, a lot of time gets wasted, and this is where we are trying to focus where automations can help you in saving time. Then we’ll talk about three best practices here, and covering different aspects in terms of setting customer expectations, build customer service and how you can bring in productivity in your team.
So first of all, we are going to focus on how to keep your staff on track using automation. So the first thing that we’re going to talk about is automated case assignments let’s take an example that you are an educational institute, and usually you would have only a couple of emails or, a couple of instances where all the students can come and contact you. So in that case, everything would be coming into one big inbox, and then you have to segregate things. Whereas usually this falls under the admin department, they look through the emails and then they pass it on to different schools as they have to, or different departments, or different kinds of requests like someone trying to get a refund or someone trying to book a place a boarding place, and these kind of things. So you might be getting different kinds of requests into one general mailbox, and then the admin staff has to segregate them. Whereas if you automate all this using a helpdesk, you can save a lot of time. We’ll talk about them in detail as to how to set them up, so as we go about, I want you to think how these automations can help you in your business. As we talk, if you have any questions how it can help you, please feel free to drop in your questions in the question section and we’ll take them up.
Let’s say you are a business which supports different kinds of grants, let’s say you are in phone support and you support all kinds of phones, HTC, Samsung, Apple, and then you have different brands and people can log a case from the HTC brand or they can log a case from the Samsung brand. You have different technicians who look after two different brands that you are supporting. You don’t want them to look through each case and then pass it on to each other e.g. ‘this is from HTC, I think you should be looking at it, and this is from Samsung, and I think you should be looking at it’ and so in order to avoid all that confusion and make sure that your staff is actually working on providing good service, rather than spending time or wasting time rather, in sifting through the cases. In that case, automate case assignments is one of the things that you can make use of so that your staff gets productive with their work.
The next one is automate reply and resolution deadlines. You would have otherwise heard of it as an SLA as well, so that’s what people generally call it, an SLA. So that’s another thing that you can automate here. So let’s say you use the helpdesk internally, and you have internal customers and some of your customers could be the senior board members, and then at times they have to end up with setting up meetings on the spot, and then as an IT team, you have to set up or get the equipment that they need for the meeting. In that case, you might have to get them quick service in terms of, if they say that the meeting room has to be set up within 10 minutes, and they log a request with the IT team, you can set up automated client resolution deadlines depending on the kind of request that is coming in, or the person that the request is coming in from. So rather than your staff having to worry about ‘this was a request came in which came in 10 minutes ago and I have to get this done’ and then they have to keep a note of it. So even if they might be working on one case, at the back of their mind they have something else running, and they have something else they have to take care of. So these kind of things can create a lot of confusion, or they may not let the person work or give their best when working on a particular case. You have this opportunity to automate reply and resolution deadlines so that they’re automatically taken care of. You can segregate, let’s say if there is a sales request coming in, or you want it to be answered within four hours and you want it to be resolved within eight hours, or if there is a support request which is with high priority, you want it to be dealt with within an hour, or it has to be resolved within two hours. So, these kind of things you can automate easily, and your staff doesn’t have to worry to keep a time on things that something doesn’t go amiss. So that’s what we mean when we say automate reply and resolution deadlines.
Finally, it’s ‘keep closer tabs on high-priority customers’. This is basically a combination of both the above points that we discussed. So, you automate case assignments, and then based on the high priority customers you can create a kind of automation where all the cases from high-priority customers are assigned as soon as they come in, or you can give them a special reply and resolution deadline if the case is coming in from a high-priority customer. So, let’s take an example here which we generally get asked a lot. So, some people say that they have a special customer or a special organization that they deal with, and they want to set up a particular prior resolution deadline for that customer or for that organization. This is where you can automate, so you don’t have to worry about if the case has come from ‘so and so company’, I want to go and manually change and set the reply hours or set the resolution hours. So, you don’t have to worry about that, it can be automatically taken care of through automations. So, where you select if the case is coming from this particular organization, apply this ‘reply and resolution deadline’. So, this is how automations can help you keep tabs on high-priority customers as well.
Another example where you can think of automations is, let’s say you have the previous example, we were talking about a senior board member sending in a request, and then you have a new starter and you don’t want the new starter to be dealing with that request. Instead you want an experienced person to be dealing with such requests. In that case, again, you can make sure that if the case is coming from this particular customer, I want it to always be assigned to a senior person or an experienced person in the team, so that it can be resolved or replied quickly. So, these are the kind of things which you can achieve through automation, and they can help your staff to stay on track. You don’t have to worry about assigning cases to each other, you don’t have to worry about sorting through the cases e.g. when was the last time it was required? Did I miss the (unclear), did I miss the reply on the case? So, all these things can be automated and in return your staff can focus on actually delivering good customer service.
So I’ll walk you through as to how to set them up. I’ve got them set up already for you. So you go to the admin panel of your Kayako instance, and then the first thing that we talked about is segregating or auto-assigning cases based on the brand that they came in from. So let’s check this one. So we have this branch set up here, so every case that comes from the Kayako brand, it has to be assigned to the support team. So similarly, you can have tens of brands and then you can select if the brand is equal to this, it should go to the support team, or it has to be tagged with the brand names. You can add a tag, let’s say Kayako. So you can do different kind of things, automated actions, based on the brand that the case is coming from. Also, you can set assignee if you want that particular assignee to be looking after a particular brand. In that case, you can do that as well.
Next up, we talked about setting up reply and resolution deadlines. So we’ll take that up under the SLAs. So you go here, once again under the admin area, and then you have organization based SLAs. So what you do is, you select the criteria as if the organization is equal to Kayako, and then you say the first reply time, next reply time, resolution time for that particular organization. So, any case that comes in from Kayako would be given this priority, or for the first reply would be within an hour and the next reply once the customer has replied back would be within two hours, and it has to be resolved within three hours, or it will show you missed the SLA. You can select whether you want it to be run on operational calendar hours or your business hours, so you have the option to define your business hours if you work 9-5, it will be running only from 9-5. You can do that under ‘business hours’. You go here, and then you assign the business hours. So you select and then you assign the business hours, so 9-5 and whichever days you work. You then link it with the teams and the SLA plans would run according to that.
Then going back to our other triggers and high priority customers. So let’s say the customer has a tag added ‘VIP’ so when you create a user account and you add the tag VIP, based on that it can be written. So let’s say the case tag contains one of the following ‘VIP’, and then you want to change priority to high and then you would assign it to a particular staff member, and then you can make all those changes here in the actions. Going back to the next best practice, which is ‘help set expectations’, customer service is all about setting right expectations upfront. What it leads to is less friction and keeping people happy. So when you’re setting right expectation it is human nature that if you have the right expectations set up, you know what to expect and then you don’t get disappointed. So that’s what we are trying to achieve here through the second best practice that we’re going to talk about. So the normal workflow is that the customer contacts you and then you send them an autoresponder that we have received your request and then you deal with it, and then there is a reply which goes to the customer. Now how can we make it better using automation? So instead of sending a normal autoresponder, we now have the option where you can send a different autoresponder if someone submits a case during you out of business hours. So let’s say in the autoresponder you have a normal reply time of 4 hours to every request that comes in, but your business hours are 9-5 and someone submits a request or a case at 6pm in the evening when it’s out of your business hours. Autoresponder would still be same saying our normal reply in business hours is four hours, which would not be the case here because you have set the expectation for the customer that it is four hours. So he would be expecting a reply from you in four hours, whereas you know that it is out of your business hours so this is one thing that you can automate here. So if someone sends a case outside of your business hours, you can send a different autoresponder saying ‘we are closed at the moment, once we are open this is the time that we take to normally get back to you a request’, so this helps you to set the right expectation upfront with the customer. If you don’t have this out of office business autoresponder, it could be that people end up coming back to you and asking you about an update on the request and once again when they come back to you for an update, you would still be out of office hours. That leads to further friction, so all of this can be avoided by setting up the right kind of autoresponders and automations.
Next up is ‘follow-up notification’. So let’s say you have provided a service, and then the issue is resolved and then in the end the customer gives you a rating. It’s a good or a bad rating. In that case again, you can use that to your advantage or to create further relation or good communication or good relations with the customer. Let’s say someone submits a good rating, and then through automations, what you can do is send them a quick acknowledgement saying, ‘you said that we did a good job and we promise that we will continue to provide a good job, having good service in the future as well’, and then similarly if someone submits a bad rating for some reason, then you can take a follow up on that as well. You don’t have to do the oldest manually, and all of this can be easily achieved through automations. So let’s say someone submits a bad rating and then you can send them a quick follow-up saying, ‘we got a bad rating, and then we want to understand what went wrong. What can we do to make it better for you the next time you need to contact us?’ So this is a kind of feedback or a kind of expectation that you can set with the customer saying that that you are actually listening to the requests that are coming in, and so it creates a good customer service as it sets the right expectations and it’s good customer service as well.
I’ll show you quickly how to set that up. Let’s say server based notification – first we talked about out of business hours autoresponder – so let’s say someone has submitted a case which is not equal to your business hours. The case type is nucleus created, because we want to send autoresponder only when there is a new case created. That’s the kind of conditions we have set in. And then you have ‘send a notification to the requester’ and another good thing here is that you can use make use of placeholders which will automatically pick up the content or the message that you want to send to the customer. So that’s a case ID, you can give them the case ID and say we have received your request however, we are closed for the day and we’ll be back tomorrow at 9:00 in the morning, we’ll get back in touch as soon as we can or as soon as we are open. So this is the kind of autoresponder that you can send when someone contacts you out of your business hours.
The other one that we talked about is server based notifications, so let’s say you have received in a case that has a satisfaction rating which is equal to bad, and the status is received. So because you have to set up the triggers in such a way that there is an event linked with that, so this is why we are adding in the satisfaction state is equal to received, and satisfaction rating is equal to bad. Then you email the requester the placeholders that I talked about, so you don’t have to (unclear) so you can request the name so it will automatically pick up the name of the requester who requested for the case, and then say, ‘sorry for the experience, please feel free to drop us a line and how we can improve or make it better for the next time’, so this kind of gives the customer a feeling that they are being listened to and then you actually act on that feedback. So it may not be possible for you to contact every single customer out there to get feedback from them on what went wrong, or what went right and so these kind of things can help you get a lot more information from them which you can use to your advantage.
Now we go back to the third best practice, which is keeping customers informed. So we have some expectations and now we want to keep the customers informed throughout their journey while the case is open with us. So usually a customer contacts you and then what happens is sometimes, if you would have sent the auto responder as well, but what about what happens after that with the case? How do you keep the customer notified? As we are talking about automation, we want to make sure that the workload for your team goes down using the automation best practices. So what can you do using automations that the customers doesn’t have to contact you back time and again to request update on their case? What possibly can you do which leads to less friction as well? So you can set up triggers, you can set up automation rules, which will notify the customer on every single update on the case. So let’s say it triggers a customer notification when the case is assigned. So you can set up a notification rule which will let the customer know that, first you tell them your case is received, which is the auto responder, and you set up a trigger when the case is automatically assigned to a staff member, so then you send another update to the customer saying, ‘your case is now assigned to an agent, you can expect to hear back in the next couple of hours’, or in the next hour as per your requirements that you might have in your support team or in your business. It all depends on your structure. Imagine if this happens and the customer doesn’t have to come back to you at all, it can reduce a lot of manual work for your support team or for your team in general, which is using the help desk. Let’s say you have a particular status of ‘on hold’ where you put the case on hold. This signifies that the case is now under discussion internally, or it needs some internal discussion. Then you want to let the customer know, so you can set up a trigger saying when status is equal to ‘on hold’, send the customer a notification that ‘we are currently discussing your case, or your requirement, and this is the minimum working hours, or minimum business days that we need to pull off this discussion and we’ll get back in touch’. So it all point to keeping the customer informed of what is happening with his request.
Let’s talk about retail in particular, how it can help in retail. So recently I placed an order with JD sports and then at every single point I was sent a notification that, ‘your order is now dispatched’ or ‘it is now selected’ or ‘it has now reached the store’, so every single point of time, I had the information what was up with my order. So this kept me informed. You can do the same thing with this kind of automation request, so you can let the customer know that the order is placed, it has dispatched delivered, or collected, so these are the kind of things which help you to give the customer in the loop all the time. Then let’s take another example, let’s say you deal with cancellation requests. So you have a customer who has requested you for a translation, be it some kind of retail order or a software subscription etc. and then you finalize everything, and in the end you have this task or you have this tip where you have to get final information from the customer. You send an email to the customer but yet if for some reason the customer misses the email, he doesn’t read it, or he opened it but he didn’t actually read it, and he didn’t send any approval. Because through miscommunication or missing the email, what happens is the card gets charged again, or the order which was supposed to be cancelled gets delivered. So this ends up not resulting in good customer service. How can you avoid it using automations? So let’s say you are waiting to hear from the customer and then you can set up a trigger or automation loop wherein, if you are waiting to hear from the customer and it has been more than 24 hours, or how many hours you want to set as per your requirement, and you haven’t heard back from the customer, you send another email notification to the customer, and in case you don’t get reply back from one of the email notifications, automations are so powerful that you can even set them up to send in text messages as well. So you can have integrations through (unclear). All of this we will be sharing with you at the end, as in how you can set them up. So you can send them text messages as well as in terms of reminders. So all of this helps you keep the customer in the loop and it all leads to good customer experience and less workload for your team. Things get resolved quickly when they are automated, because you can actually focus on fixing things rather than going through things and understanding them, and other things which can be automated and you end up doing manually, so you avoid that if we can actually exploit the information to the best.
Next up, I will show you how you can set these up. ‘Inform customer case assigned’, so let’s say a case assignee changed from unassigned; so first the case assignee was unassigned, and it is changed from unassigned to assigned. Then you can let the customer know that your case is now assigned to an agent, you can expect to hear back in the next two hours. So this lets them know that now it is assigned and someone is looking into the case. Then you have a monitor. You can have a particular status where you move the case into when you’re waiting, and the customer is pending. The case status is equal to pending and a last update made by the requester is greater than 24 hours. And then you send up a follow-up request e.g. ‘we’re waiting on you’. So, what is the difference between triggers and automations, so triggers and monitors. Monitors is basically a check which is done every hour, so the system will keep tracking whenever this request is met and then it’ll send out a notification to the customer. Whereas the trigger is linked with an event, when an event happens, it triggers, and it performs the actions that you have actually asked the trigger to perform.
Next up is ‘building an automation strategy for your team’. So, when you’re setting up the automation, so when you’re thinking of how to set up, or how to exploit the automation rules, let’s say, you have to think about the bigger picture, what are you trying to achieve? What are the support metrics that you need to fix using automations? Is it the CSAT, or is it the first response time that you are looking to improve? So, we already talked about CSAT as in good or bad rating that is submitted by the customer, so you can work on that using automation rules and sending them reminders or follow-ups – what went wrong or what went right – and then you can improve on that. Similarly, with (unclear), that is the first response time, so you have those automated reply and resolution deadlines, so you don’t have to wait for someone to manually set the timer in and then start working on it. Whereas all of these are automated using the automation rules, so, once you realize what is the support metric that you’re looking to achieve, whether it is keeping the customer in the loop, whether it is setting the right expectations or whether it is keeping your staff more productive, by actually getting them to do the actual work. So once you have decided that based on that, you can go through the number of automations which are possible in the helpdesk, and exploit them to the best. While doing all of that, you have to be very realistic and you have to understand your strengths and weaknesses. There will be so many options, but you don’t want to go overboard with so many automations that it kills the actual customer experience. There’s always a thin line, so be careful about that, so understand your strengths and weaknesses and play according to that.
‘Building an automation strategy for your team.’ Let’s talk about it with an example. So largest opportunities for improvement, keep staff working productively, and then you create structure and healthy expectations as well. So let’s say you have an IT team which is using the helpdesk and they deal with a lot of asset management requests when people need new laptops, they need a new phone depending on their stature, and then there are different kind of asset management requests coming in, and where the IT team cannot approve them on their own, they need to send the request to someone in senior management or to the finance department for approval, for the invoices or for the money that is it is going to cost. So you can do that easily through automations: let’s say a request comes in to the IT team, and it changes its status to ‘approval required’. So as soon as it moves it to the stages called ‘approval required’, the case is automatically assigned to the finance team or to the manager of the person who has sent in the request. Once they approve and change the status to approved, the case is assigned back to the IT team, so they can go back and proceed with the request and we get the asset for the person who has requested for it. So in this way, it takes over a lot of the manual work that the teams have to do when getting the work done from each other, when the work involves permissions across teams. So there are different kinds of workflows which you can set up internally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using your helpdesk for external customers or internal customers, automations can be handy in both ways. So that’s how you can exploit or use automations to bring down your workload, to improve your support metrics and to keep everyone happy who is using the helpdesk. Using them, you can also ensure that the customers have all the information that they need, for example, keeping them in the loop every now and then on every update which is made on the case.
And it’s question and answer time from here on.
D – One of the questions I have received here is, ‘how do we block our agents from changing the assignee of the case?’ Some managers would like to impose a little more limitation over their agents and that’s really quite a simple trigger that we can create here. Under triggers, under the automation menu on the admin panel, I’ll create a new trigger. You’ll have to give it a name ‘block assignee’, the conditions for this particular situation would be the case assignee being changed and the current user’s role type being an agent. There’s an owner level, an admin level, an agent level, a collaborator level and a customer level. We don’t want agents to be able to change the assignee, we only want that to be available for people further up the hierarchy. We just set up this criteria like this ‘perform the following actions’, ‘assignee revert to original’, save it, and that trigger is now in place. I’m not going to keep it on here, this is just for testing purposes, however if you were logged into this helpdesk as an agent and tried to change the assignee of a case, it would be immediately reported, and that trigger would be in place.
Likewise, another question I got here is, ‘some of our cases we need to get approval from management before the ticket can proceed, for instance like purchasing equipment, can we make automations to handle that workflow?’ A lot of you may be familiar with custom fields in previous versions of Kayako, we’re calling them case vehicles here in the new version, and you can see that in addition to the system, the default fields that are set up here much like in in the older Kayako classic, we’ve added some custom fields here; in this case, coffee and billing info. So let’s say if the person selects a particular type of coffee, it needs to go to a manager for approval. In reality, that situation is highly unlikely but again for demonstration purposes we’ll go over to our triggers here. ‘New trigger’, we’ll have to give it a name ‘Coffee approval’, select a condition. You’ll see the custom fields are listed here at the bottom of the case field. Here’s all the default ones like I mentioned before e.g. subject priority type, everything that you’re used to, the custom fields will also be listed at the bottom here. So we select coffee, equal to, we’ve given this two options, latte or black, so if the person needs the extra stuff for the latte, then we’ll perform the following action: we’ll assign that case to a certain team. In this case it’ll be the approval team. Save that trigger and it’s now in place. Now any time someone submits a form on your website and has selected latte as their option for coffee, then that will be automatically assigned to the approval team and you can change the permissions for the approval team to be only accessible to certain agents or only viewable to certain agents. The system is really fully malleable and customizable around what you need.
Another question I got about custom fields which isn’t necessarily tied to automation, but is a great question, it’s just that we need to ensure that some agents, not customers, but you member agents have filled in some custom fields before they close the case so we recorded the categories in every the case. So if you have some additional information like every single ticket needs to have a final cost on it, and we can’t submit these tickets without having that final cost, and you have a custom field for them to input that final cost, in this case it would be the billing info, all you would have to do is select this little checkbox here for agents. This field is required when resolving a case. Save that (I’m not going to save it right now just for testing purposes) but if that trigger were to be in place and that custom field was empty, the agents would be blocked from resolving that ticket and the field would turn red. Essentially when you’re trying to fill out a form and it says, ‘wait, you’re not done yet’, it’s that kind of error. So it’s a great way to put in place to make sure that, not only your customers but your agents are tying up all the loose ends and crossing T’s and dotting I’s before the cases are submitted.
And the last one I have here is, ‘we want to ensure that we respond to our social channels like Twitter quicker than our standard reply time. How do we do that?’ That’s a two-part thing that we would be setting up here, I think the first part is to start with SLAs here. I’m going to create a new SLA, we’ll have to give it a name as always, like Twitter SLA, and again this is all conditional. The automations, triggers, monitors, SLAs, they’re all conditional, so in this case the condition would be the source channel equal to Twitter. Twitter is a medium that really does demand a higher response time; it’s not like email, or it’s not like a phone call. We’re living in a world of instant delivery, and people are expecting a response right away and that’s why they’re communicating in that manner. So if you want to ensure that your agents are responding to those faster, the first thing to do would be to set up a an SLA here for instance you had everything else set at one hours, two hours or two hours, three hours four hours for regular cases, we just put in one hour here for first reply time for Twitter so on and so forth with next reply time resolution time, save that SLA. Through the use of monitors, we can use the monitor to find cases that are close to breaching that SLA. I always have to give a name and one of the categories here is SLA, so you can either time till next breach, reply time remaining, first response time remaining, time since last breach, resolution time remaining, and in this case, a good general one would be the time till next breach. So if the time till next breach is less than or equal to one hour, and the SLA is equal to Twitter SLA, then we will email a team here, whichever team and say, ‘respond to your Twitter’. Obviously, you would probably be a little polite than that, and complicated, but you can also use placeholders here which we will go on more about further to take custom data from that case, like the requesters first name, or their email address or any personal information that you want to interject, so you don’t have to type that out manually it’s all taken care of on the backend.
With that, I got one more here and where we had mentioned before about sending a text message notification, traditionally we deal primarily with email notifications, it is possible to send a text message notification through the use Zapier. Zapier is a third-party software that we’re working with that you can use to integrate with hundreds of different apps. That’s all set up through their website. So using an integration you could set up a Zap, or trigger would be a new case creation or a case update and using an SMS application and Zapier like Pushover or a (unclear) or whatever you’re using for SMS to send an SMS to the desired mobile number. It’s great because Kayako, with this functionality is now tied in to so many different programs, and I think you’re really going to be amazed at how well it integrates with your feature set from external sources.
I believe that is all the questions I have at this time, Alicia, do you have anything else?
A – No, I think we’re good. I’m sorry, I think we had a couple more questions sneak in at the last minute, but we are out of time so we’re going to follow up with you personally after the webinar. So that being said, thank you all so much for joining us today. If you’re a current Kayako customer you know exactly how to get a hold of us at any time, support@kayako.com, messenger chat, whatever you need, social media. If you are currently checking Kayako out, we really encourage you to check out a free trial, and we just re-launched the new product as Daniel said, and we’re really thrilled with the positive feedback that we’ve been receiving in terms of how we’ve built this new experience in terms of helping businesses customer support as their competitive advantage.
So, hope you’ve enjoyed the presentation today again any questions feel free to reach out and we’ll be emailing out a recording of this presentation to all of you afterwards, and following up with the last few questions afterwards, so thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day