Managing Regional Routing Rules

Setting Up Regional Routing Rules

Routing refers to the system by which live chat or calendar requests are assigned to agents. Within the Live Chat and Calendar bot skills, there are a couple default routing options:

  • Route to a single agent
  • Last routed agent
  • Route to a group of agents
  • Route to a team
  • Route by account owner

If your organization wishes to assign live chat requests and calendar drops based on the visitor's geography, an additional bot skill will be required.

Using Conditional Branching to define regions

The Conditional Branching Skill allows you to create branches to reflect each agent's routing rule.

For example, if you have an agent named Kevin whose regional territory is the western United States, you might do the following:

  1. Add a Conditional Branching skill to your bot builder by dragging it out from the bot skills menu
  2. Double click to edit
  3. Click "Add new branch"
  4. Give your branch a name: for this example, two good options would be "Kevin's Rule" or "Western US". As you set this up, keep in mind that you might one day need to update this rule if Kevin gets promoted or if territories change. Naming these branches will make your life easier down the road.
  5. In the dropdown for Filter Criteria, select "US State", under the category Demographics
  6. In the comparison dropdown, select "in"
  7. In the final dropdown, multiselect the States included in Kevin's territory
  8. Click "Save Branch"

Repeat these steps for each of your agents' territories.

Assigning Reps to each region

Once you've created branches for each of your geographical regions, you can hit "Save and Close" in the conditional branching skill.

You should see exits from the bot skill for each of your regions, plus a "fallback path". This will be the exit for any site visitor whose location doesn't match any of the branches you've already defined.

In order to assign reps to these regions, follow these steps:

  1. Drag a Live Chat or Calendar Invite skill out from the Bot Skill Menu and drop it into the bot builder
  2. Double click to edit
    1. Type the message to be sent while your rep is coming into the chat, or when the calendar is dropped
    2. Select "Route to a single agent", then select the agent who owns the first territory on your Conditional Branching skill
    3. For Live Chat: Select the amount of time you want the bot to wait for before moving on without the rep (default is 30 seconds).
    4. For Calendar Invite: Select the meeting type that you want visitors to be able to book through chat
  3. Click "Save and Close"
  4. Connect the appropriate branch to this skill.

Repeat these steps for each of your reps' territories.

Creating a global routing sequence

The best way to manage this system across multiple chatbots is to create a global sequence that contains your conditional branching and live chat skills. This will allow you to reuse this same routing sequence without having to recreate the conditional branching skill each time.

To create a global routing sequence:

  1. Select the conditional branching and live chat skills that you want to sequence. This can be done either by hitting the space bar and dragging to select, or by switching from "Pan Mode" to "Select Mode" in the right side tool bar.
  2. In the purple menu that pops up at the top of the bot builder, click "Sequence"
  3. In the pop up modal, give your sequence a name and a description, these will only be visible on the back end for organizational purposes. Pro Tip: create one sequence for live chat and another for calendar, and name them accordingly
  4. Toggle the switch to create a Global Sequence
  5. Click "Save and Close"

This will condense your series of bot skills into a single, dark blue sequence skill. You can double click that sequence skill to open it up and see all the bot skills again.

Add two sequence exits:

  1. No one available
  2. No one responds
  1. Connect your Live Chat exits to these sequence exits.

Now you can use your sequence just like a normal live chat skill in other chatbots!

Managing and Updating Regional Routing Rules

Once you have created regional routing global sequences for Live Chat and Calendar Invites, you can effectively edit all chatbots from one place.

To update global sequences:

  1. In the Bot Management section, navigate to the "Sequences" tab
  2. Select the Sequence you wish to edit
  3. Make whatever changes you need to. Clearly labeled conditional branches will help here - if you need to remove or replace a rep, simply update the settings of the Live Chat or Calendar Invite skill assigned to them. If you need to update regional borders, simply update the branches of your Conditional Branching skill
  4. Once you've finished making changes, be sure to click "Save" in the top right corner. A modal will pop up prompting you to either update the global sequence or stop tracking the global sequence. Be sure to update the global sequence, so that your changes can be effective across all chatbots using that sequence.

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