I​ntro

In this card we take a deep-dive into Mobile Service Cloud's (MSC formerly known as ROBIN) routing possibilities.

Personal routing is at the heart of MSC. This means that every incoming conversation always ends up in a personal inbox. Unless the incoming conversation gets auto-archived (e.g. spam, order confirmations, etc.) -
which happens in the settings under ‘Triggers’ (Rules-based). Who gets which question in the inbox depends on the applied routing principles. There are 4 active routing principles that can apply.
They are:
• Agent status
• Web stores
• Triggers (Rules-based and Skills-based routing)
• Capacity & round robin
Let’s zoom in to each one.

R​esolution:

Agent status

When agents login to https://app.robinhq.com, they land into their own personal dashboard. In the upper-left corner they see their name, picture and status.

There are 4 different statuses:

• Offline
• Online
• Service hours
• Away
Plus:
• Busy (on the phone) - effectively the same as ‘Offline’
• Busy (max. chats reached) - effectively the same as ‘Offline’.

What do they mean?

• Offline: this means that you are only eligible to receive ‘Non-instant’ conversations. SLAs for these conversations are set through ‘Web store’ templates.
• Online: this means that you are now also eligible to receive ‘Instant’ conversations. These conversations are treated the same as live chats and need to be answered within’ 30 seconds.
• Service hours: this status means that you’ll be automatically switched to ‘Online’ based on the opening hours that you’ve set under ‘Templates’. The template then gets connected to a Web store.
• Away: you are now away in the entire system. This means you will not be assigned any incoming questions, unless you are a ‘Web store owner’ and all other teammates are ‘Away’.
• Busy (on the phone): this means that you have been assigned a phone call (through the VoIP integration) and are now ‘Offline’. This
means you won’t get any more new instant conversations.
• Busy (max. chats reached): this means that the maximum number of chats is reached (can be set per agents). You will not get any more Instant Conversations.

Max. number of chats

Under Settings > Team, you can set - for each individual team member, please see Add a user account to MSC

Note:

Any team member in MSC can view and change each other's status through the ‘Team Inbox Overview’ on the dashboard, please see Team inbox overview

Web stores

Coming from an eCommerce background, the ‘web store’ concept in MSC allows customers to add multiple web stores to MSC - each with unique templates for customization. Web stores is a broader concept that allows customers to segment their customer service operation to their needs.

It allows you to create a separate segment for a team, topic, language, brand, channel, URL, etc. Web stores segmentation is used for customization (message templates, web widgets, SLAs per channel, suggested answers, et al.) and routing.

Please see "web store" for the exact field required for routing.

Triggers

In the Settings you find two different sections under ‘Triggers’. They are:
• Rules-based triggers
• Advanced triggers

Triggers can be used for Routing purposes, but also to automatically add a tag to a conversation. Let’s take a closer look at these trigger options, with a focus on Routing.

• Rules-based triggers: these triggers only serve to route incoming questions directly to the ‘Archive’ or ‘Unwanted’ inbox. Use cases include ‘Spam’, ‘Newsletters’ or ‘Order confirmations’.
  Interesting feature: click the ‘Use to as From’ checkbox if you want to see e-mails that you are sending to customers in the conversation history of their customer profile.
• Conversations in the Unwanted inbox, get automatically
  deleted after 7 days.
• Conversations in the Archive will never be deleted
• Advanced triggers: these triggers are used as a fine-meshed filter ontop-off the web store routing. So, MSC first looks at the web stores to determine routing. Then it looks at the ‘trigger labels’ to determine which agent gets which question (within’ a certain web store).

This is how it works:

• MSC ‘reads’ the keywords in the subject-line and body text of a
  conversation and matches them with the keywords that were
  indicated in the trigger labels
• These labels have agents connected to them. Per label you
  determine the skills-level of the agent.
• The higher the ‘Green’ skills-level, the more likely the agent is to receive these kind of conversations.
• When the skills level of the agent is ‘Red’ on a certain label, the agent will not get any conversations on this
  topic.
• The agents that are not added to the label are seen as ‘neutral’. They can get messages, but only as ‘overflow’
  from the agents with green skills levels.
• Overflow has to do with ‘Capacity’, which gets explained in the next chapter
• All the way on top of the Trigger, you see a field called ‘Capacity threshold. This number determines
  the total amount of inbox items for the entire team,before capacity starts counting alongside skill.
• ‘Under the hood’, the Advanced Triggers work with a ‘scoring’ or ‘weighting’ mechanism. The scoring is on skills, keywords and layer.
• Trigger labels can be used hierarchical. You can drag them to the right once or twice. By doing so, you make them more specific. So, in the below example, ‘Damaged’ is in the third layer, and therefore gets a heavier weighting than ‘Refund’. More on this in the next section on ‘Capacity’.
  

Note: under ‘Advanced Trigger’ labels you can also indicate if you want a conversation automatically tagged based on the keywords in the message. The ‘skills-level’ slider then determines if the tag gets added as an opt-out (high ‘skills’ level) or opt-in tag (lower ‘skills’ level).

Reading the right keywords

Advanced Triggers only read the first message in a conversations. So, if the first message is ‘Hi’, we don’t have much to route on. This can be particularly difficult for live chats, bot hand-handoff’s and also on OTT channels, such as WhatsApp Business. Here’s how we solve it:

• Bot hand-over: in the CM.com scripted chatbot you can add context fields. When you drag the building block ‘Hand-over’ in the bot-flow, you see various sections. Under ‘Context’ you see two sets of keys and values; one to activate Web store routing and one to activate Triggers (based on keywords).
• For web store routing, the key is ‘WebStoreReferrer’. Then you need to fill in one word as a value. This exact word needs to match what you fill in in MSC under ‘Incoming bot variables’ (Settings > Web stores > click
  Web store > Incoming conversations)
• For routing based on Trigger, the key is ‘RoutingKeywords’. Then, under ‘Value’, you can fill in
  several words or phrases. MSC will match these keywords or keyphrases with the Trigger labels in the
  Settings.
• Bot hand-off 2: Skill is set as routing-keywords for CAIC skill "string" value referencing agent skills defined in Mobile Service Cloud. Set in the conversation state when returned in an answer from CAIC. Used as a variable for skill-based routing when performing the handover in Mobile Service Cloud.
• Live chat: In Settings > Templates > Conversation > ‘Conversation template’ we can check the box ‘Ask for subject’. This adds a subjectline to live chats and we can then route (and tag) based in that.
• OTT channels: you can only be sure that advanced routing (based on keywords in the first message) works for OTT channels (such as WhatsApp of Messenger) when you combine it with the chat-bot. Otherwise, you need to rely on web store routing when a customer uses e.g. ‘Hi’ as a first message.

Capacity & round-robin

After ‘Web stores’, ‘Agent status’ and ‘Triggers’ did their routing work, there can still be scenarios where two or more agents are left as possible routing options. MSC then starts looking at capacity. When capacity is also equal, we then distribute the questions ‘round robin’ - which essentially means ‘taking turns’.

Capacity is quite a complex little beast ‘under the hood’ of MSC. The below example shows you how it works. You can see it as an algorithm that can still be tweaked by the user (Team Leads & Customer Success Managers).
In complex customer service environments, it usually takes a few days to fine-tune the exact routing.