The conversation assignments feature will organize all incoming messages and ensure notifications are relevant to specific individuals and or teams. The conversation assignments feature is broken up into two parts:
Individual assignments: Ability to assign contacts and conversations to individual team members. This feature is available in the Professional plan.
Team assignments: Ability to assign contacts and conversations to individual team members and also teams that you create. This feature includes #1 but also the ability to create teams and assign contacts and conversations to teams. This feature is only available in the Enterprise plan.
Let's look at use cases for each option
Horizon Healthcare Staffing
Horizon Healthcare Staffing is a fictitious healthcare staffing company. Horizon helps local hospitals staff RNs (registered nurses) and CNAs (certified nursing assistants) for shifts. Horizon employs ten staffing managers who each manage several customers (RNs and CNAs). As shifts open up at hospitals, staffing managers attempt to staff the shifts by texting the relevant healthcare professionals they own and manage.
Since each staffing manager individually manages one or more customers, it makes sense to assign each contact in Medallia Concierge to the associated staffing manager. Then, when texting back and forth, even though all staffers use the same Medallia Concierge inbox, they are only notified when incoming texts come in from their customers. In this case, there is no need to create teams, as contacts are assigned directly to specific Medallia Concierge team members.
Hotel Medallia Conciergerama
Hotel Medallia Conciergerama is a fictitious hotel that uses Medallia Concierge so they can communicate with their guests. Unlike the previous use case, guests aren't managed by specific Medallia Concierge team members. Instead, based on the context of the guest's request, they need to be routed to the appropriate team.
For this case, a team would be created for each "department," such as Front Desk, Concierge, and Valet. Incoming requests from guests are then assigned to specific teams based on the requests. Messages can either be auto-assigned via Zings (automations) or by a human operator. Very soon we'll be able to use AI and Natural Language Processing to evaluate the incoming message and automatically assign based on the "intent" of the request. 🤓
Keep in mind that just because requests are being assigned to teams doesn't mean that specific conversations can't be assigned to individual team members if it's warranted. In other words, the two use cases in this article can be combined.
What options are available?
Automatically un-assign closed conversations on new inbound message. In the Hotel Medallia Conciergerama example, each inbound conversation could potentially be routed to a different team depending on the context and what is required. In this case, it's important to turn this feature on. When on, this feature will ensure that, if closed, each inbound message will automatically clear the assignment to allow for proper routing. Each new incoming request needs to be re-evaluated for "intent" and then properly routed.
Automatically self-assign when replying to a conversation. When on, if a conversation is un-assigned, this feature will self-assign the conversation to whoever on the team replies first. Once assigned to an individual team member, replies from other team members will not re-assign. This feature allows someone to automatically "pick-up" a conversation by assigning it to themselves, which will take the conversation out of the shared view.
