Article: Automatically Closing a Conversation After a Defined Period of Inactivity
Yong Wai Ting
Business Problem:
Business wants a way to automatically close a conversation after a defined period of inactivity, in cases where agents forget to do so or when awaiting feedback from the customers.
Pain Point:
Conversations remain open indefinitely due to agent oversight or awaiting customer responses.
Yong Wai Ting
Proposed Solution:
Automatically closing a conversation is not encouraged. Read on for further details on closing a conversation automatically and manually:
A) Automatic Closing of Conversation
- When a conversation is closed automatically, it might be that the Contact is still engaging, (although not within the timeframe the set in the workflow), which could result in a conversation closing before the Contact intends for it to end. This can be frustrating for the Contact to have to explain their issue again to a different agent, which leads to an overall negative experience.
- Currently, there is no ideal way to track inactivity. You may have a pre-set waiting time and number of jumps in your workflow, but it cannot track when the inactivity would have happened.
Due to this uncertainty, the closing notes and summaries for an automatically closed chat might not fully capture the full context.
B) Manual Closing of Conversation
- When an agent manually closes a chat, they can ensure a neat conclusion with no loose ends or unanswered messages. This attention to detail will definitely enhance the customer satisfaction.
- In cases where a customer doesn't respond immediately, the agent can choose to snooze the conversation and reconnect later to address any outstanding issues. Also, agents can proactively inform customers upfront about the potential closure of the conversation due to inactivity.
Manually closing a chat ensures more precise summary notes, leading to more accurate results in the generated reports.
Due to the risks involved in automatically closing conversations, it is recommended to manually close a conversation for now until our feature request is implemented. You may upvote this feature request here.