Assignment rules: distributing conversations and tasks
A message that arrives on WhatsApp, chat, SMS, social or email lives in the inbox as a conversation. A conversation has no protocol number, no SLA clock and no support console. Until now the only way to give it those was for an agent to click "Turn into a case" on the conversation header, which mean
Turning a conversation into a case automatically
A message that arrives on WhatsApp, chat, SMS, social or email lives in the inbox as a conversation. A conversation has no protocol number, no SLA clock and no support console. Until now the only way to give it those was for an agent to click "Turn into a case" on the conversation header, which means a message that arrives at 2 a.m. waits for someone to notice it.
The action **Turn the conversation into a case** does it by rule. Choose it under Settings, Routing, Conversations, and the rule opens a real ticket with protocol, SLA, macros and everything the support console offers.
- **When it runs**: on a new conversation, on a new message from the customer, or after X minutes with no reply. Those are the three moments in which there is something new to decide about.
- **Which conversations**: the same conditions as any other rule apply first, so you can promote only WhatsApp, only outside business hours, only when the text contains a word such as "cancel", only in a given queue.
- **What the case gets**: the queue, the priority and the category you choose in the rule. Leave any of them empty and the case falls back to the default: the priority is derived from the conversation and the queue is decided in the console.
- **Only once**: a conversation that already produced a case is skipped, and the reason appears in the rule history. Turn off "Only if the conversation has no case yet" and a repeat run resynchronises new messages into the existing case instead of opening a second one. Either way you never end up with two cases for the same conversation.
- **Channels**: chat, WhatsApp, SMS, social and email become cases. A conversation that is already a case is not promoted again.
Promoting does not close the conversation and does not take it away from whoever is handling it. The team keeps talking on the channel while the case runs.
The queues in the rule are your queues
The channel, queue and destination lists in a rule now read the queues you registered under Settings, Queues: name, and a mark when the queue is inactive. If you have not created any queue yet, the two built in names (sales and support) stay available so nothing changes for who never needed more than those.