Best practices for automations
Last Update: Oct 2024 • Est. Read Time: 5 MINThis article will cover the tools that can process automations within any Kustomer organization, as well as provide use case examples and testing methods.
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In this article
- Automation methods
- Examples of common automations
- Use Shortcuts with automations
- Testing new automations
- Adjusting to automation and tips to remember
Automation methods
Kustomer offers three automation methods:
- Business rules
- Workflows
- Queues and routing
Business rules are simple, event-driven automations that can be utilized to automate dozens of unique processes. Kustomer offers a variety of business rule templates for common automations which can be adapted to suit the needs of your team. They can be triggered off of 8 unique conversational updates, filtered to specific criteria, and then made to act in any of the following ways:
- To change data (such as Conversation, Customer, or Company fields)
- To predict data using conversation classification (requires KIQ)
- To send messages (currently available for Email/SMS, but can also add a Note on a conversation)
- To update queues
- This option can perform queue updates based on different changes within attributes using the
changed from
operator. - This functionality is distinct from queue rules.
- This option can perform queue updates based on different changes within attributes using the
Workflows are a more powerful automation method that can be triggered by more than just conversational updates. Workflows can trigger off of external systems and applications, ingest data (via hooks), update data, and be scheduled (with time-dependent actions). In contrast to business rules, configuring workflows may require more technical knowledge of the Kustomer platform. Please reach out to the Kustomer Support team for assistance in creating or editing workflows.
Queues and routing allow for automatic triage and queueing of conversations. Conversations are placed into queues, which are then routed to available agents based upon queue rules in a first-in first-out (FIFO) format for their specified team.
Examples of common automations
Below are some examples of automations, and which automation method could be used to accomplish each use case.
Use Case | Business Rules | Workflows | Queues & Routing |
Acknowledgment auto-response (for any channel during or outside business hours) | ✔ | ✔ | |
Close out-of-office messages or "thank you" replies | ✔ | ✔ | |
Ingest or update data using hooks to show order information on a timeline | ✔ | ||
Route conversations to teams or agents based on the conversation topic type | ✔ |
Use Shortcuts with automations
Another tool frequently used along with automations is shortcuts. Shortcuts are text snippets that can be used in conversations to include boilerplates, canned responses, and other frequently-used response text. Shortcuts offer dynamic fields that can import and use customer information, like addressing a boilerplate to a customer by name, or mentioning their latest order by ID.
Along with sending a pre-composed message, shortcuts can also be used to perform actions like:
- Set or replace the conversation subject or name
- Select an email template
- Add tags
- Specify optional or custom fields like assigned user
Testing new automations
After you've set up a business rule, workflow, or queue rule, how do you tell if it's working? There are a few places in Kustomer to check after you've set up a new automated process.
Audit logs
The audit log provides you with a view of events within your Kustomer organization which can help you track activity across your team. In addition to tracking general events, business rules and workflows report events to their audit log for troubleshooting purposes.
Search
Search is a great way to find objects you've created. Based on the conditions in the search, you can match based on actions that were conducted on an object.
For example, if the attribute VIP is added to a conversation, you can search for the VIP attribute along with any other search conditions to find conversations that received the VIP attribute.
For queues and routing, you can create searches to view the conversations that go into a queue. Each conversation also has its audit log which can be used to review a detailed list of all events that occurred on the conversation.
Reporting
If attributes or custom objects are created and updated via automation, you can utilize the custom reports based on those objects to see their usage.
If you added new shortcuts and want to see the usage of each, you can view the chart under the Conversation standard report. Based off of this information, you can review or modify lesser-used shortcuts or create further automations based on the most-used shortcuts.
Adjusting to automation and tips to remember
Adding automations should help make everyday tasks more efficient for you and your team. When configured correctly, automations should not make any of your current configurations or processes more complicated.
If you're finding that your automations are causing more work or friction, or your team is forced to find workarounds, you may want to reevaluate your automations with the following considerations in mind.
Team size
- What are the day-to-day responsibilities of your agents?
- How is their work split up throughout the workday?
- What does your staffing look like?
- Do you need additional agents to help with your inbound volume or processes?
Productivity
- Use Reporting to determine and take action on outliers.
- For example: service-level agreements (SLAs), percentage of volume per channel, and conversation topics.
- In the Conversation report, inbound messages per hour can provide a better understanding of how to staff your support team.
- Use acknowledgment auto-response automations to let your customers know that you've received their message, and set proper expectations by providing an anticipated reply time. (Make sure to keep your quoted reply time ETA up-to-date as your support traffic changes.)
- Searches can help organize different types of standard objects (Customers, Conversations) and custom objects (Orders, Subscription Info). Make use of search folders to organize your saved searches.
- Team Pulse helps track your team in real time, with the ability to see agent activity and conversations in progress. (Ultimate plans only.)
Parallel or conflicting automations
There's nothing in Kustomer that would prevent you from setting up multiple automations around the same process. This can however lead to inconsistent and unpredictable results, and Kustomer cannot guarantee whether an automation (business rules, queue rule, workflow, etc) will run in a specific order or how fast it will run.
As a best practice, if you're considering creating multiple automations around the same process — for example, creating an auto-response message — we recommend sticking to 1 single automation for that process that incorporates all of the desired changes.
If 2 or more automations are set to take action on the same trigger but 1 of those automations relies on configurations made by the other automation, you should adjust the 2nd automation by applying a different trigger to guarantee that it runs after the 1st automation is finished.
Advanced configurations
It's possible to create even more complex and integrated automations between automation tasks, business rules, workflows, and queues. For example, a workflow that ingests and updates data can also be used to power queues and routing strategies that would be too complex to build within queue rules or business rules alone.
However, only advanced admins with fundamental knowledge of Kustomer's architecture and processes should attempt to create or modify these types of configurations. Contact Kustomer Support for guidance on adjusting these advanced and interconnected automation settings.