Inbound Mail (emails, voicemails) replies are always routed to the Agent assigned to the Conversation. While this could be a good Customer experience, it may not always align with your business processes.
You may want to update your incoming Mail settings if you have thoughts similar to the following:
- “We’re seeing a backup in emails, but some Customers are ‘jumping the line,’ while others aren’t getting a response for days.”
- “One of my Agents responds to a lot of Customers. Over the week, when customers respond, the emails pile up on that one Agent. The work is getting unevenly distributed across the team, which means the Customers who worked with that one Agent are getting slower responses.”
- “We believe that our Agents form a strong understanding of a Customer’s issue, and we want them to see it through to resolution as often as possible. Even if a Customer needs to wait a bit longer for a response, it’s better if the work stays with the same Agent.”
You don’t necessarily have to change your inbound mail setting. It purely depends on what your desired outcome is.
Mail routing behavior #
If you choose to assign incoming mail to the same Agent, as long as the Conversation is open and the Customer replies to the same email thread without creating a new email, the same Agent will receive the incoming mail replies from the Customer. This means:
- If, for some reason, the Agent is not available to work on the Conversation (e.g., they are on vacation, sick, etc.), your Reassignment Rules will help ensure that a different Agent picks up the Conversation and helps that Customer.
Note – If ‘Assign mail to same agent if conversation is open’ setting is active
- Due to various reasons, some inbound Mail Conversations may not always get assigned to the same agent. For example, if a Customer initiates inbound Contact that moves the Conversation to an Inbox that the agent isn’t part of, then this means the same Agent will not be assigned to the Conversation.
- Customers must reply to the same email thread to route replies to the same Agent. Creating a new email treats the reply as new Contact and routes it to an Inbox and on to another Agent.
- The Conversation Timeline will say <customer replied via email> if a reply is from an existing thread, and <customer> sent an email> if a new email is created.
- On the other hand, If you choose to route incoming mail to the same Agent if the reply comes in after a certain time threshold, be aware of how closed Conversations are affected:
- The Mail response window is only in effect if the Conversation stays open. As soon as the Agent closes a Conversation, the response window is ended, which means any net-new inbound mail messages will be routed to the next available agent.
- If an Agent marks a Conversation as “No reply needed,” the response window is ended, which means any net-new inbound mail messages will be routed to the next available agent.
