Conversation influx can be difficult to predict. Your team can sometimes struggle to scale with large amounts of support inquiries from your customers, which may impact their reactivity, the quality of their responses, your customer satisfaction, and the well-being of your team. In such dire times, it is important to be prepared.

In this guide, we'll review the various tools available to help you quickly respond to such situations and how to leverage the tools available with Crisp to efficiently reduce the load on your team and continue to provide the best customer service possible to your audience 🚀

Introduction

Before we review the solutions and tools at your disposal to help you deal with large influxes of conversations, it is important to understand your audience and their habits. Crisp provides you several ways to address such situations depending on your usage and needs, and also provides ways to analyze the traffic on your platform.

The Analytics Dashboard is a great way to review the traffic of your website and easily view the periods when your support is solicited the most. This also allows you to review the average response time of your team during specific time periods, giving you insight into the current load of your support team.
Analytics data can be exported at any time if you wish to perform deeper reviews and aggregate metrics externally to help you analyze the productivity of your team and identify behavior patterns in your inbox activity.

While data analysis and team communication help prevent issues, what specific steps can you take to reduce your team's workload and efficiently handle the most common customer questions without compromising service quality?

You have several tools available with Crisp which we will review:

The Chatbot plugin can be used to automatically and autonomously handle your users' queries according to your own customized flows.
MagicReply allows you to leverage AI to continually provide assistance and generate responses based on your own training data.
Routing and segmentation can help you better organize and assign your conversations to leverage your team's competencies and specialties easily.
More tools and features can passively help you accommodate your customers without soliciting your support team, such as our Helpdesk and the AI-powered Overlay.

I. Connecting all your communications' channels

A Shared inbox is a tool that helps you to: 1. Centralize conversations from all channels. 2. Gather your teams around one inbox. 3. Synchronize your data to personalize each conversation, no matter the channel.

Some of the most notable benefits are:

Improving internal collaboration by leveraging the power of internal note
Moving customer service from a department to a company state of mind
Making each conversation unique and personalized
Enhancing agent's productivity by stop switching back and forth between tools

All in all, the shared inbox is a modern and powerful tool that empowers teams to offer the best customer service experience while not making any compromise on quality or service continuity.

II. Leveraging a chatbot for customer service

The Chatbot allows you to set up automations in your conversations to handle certain interactions, qualify your leads, identify queries, and build different flows tailored to your needs and those of your customers.

Some examples of common usages include:

Automating responses to common questions, with buttons to guide users during their journey
Assigning conversations to different operators based on certain criteria (language, data, or time of day)
Creating automated flows to improve your lead generation or accelerate resolution times
Create an omnichannel chatbot that answers inbound messages from any channel connected with Crisp Inbox
And many more usages to make your life easier as well as enhance the quality and efficiency of your support

All in all, the Chatbot is a quick and versatile way to automate various actions in order to free your team from redundancy, allowing them to improve their reactivity when jumping into the conversation.
You can read more and get started with the Chatbot thanks to this guide.

The Chatbot can also be integrated with AI, using MagicReply. This is something we'll have a closer look at in our next sections!

You will find many guides on our Helpdesk to cover most common usages, and also various resources to dive deeper and customize scenarios to fit your own usages. The Chatbot is a very versatile and powerful tool as well as a core feature of the Unlimited plan.

III. Using MagicReply, the Crisp AI Assistant

MagicReply is an AI functionality that can generate pertinent answers for all of your conversations. Easy to set up and get started with, it can be trained on various data sources such as:

Answer Snippets: Short Q&As about common themes your customers frequently ask about.
Web Content: Add all your web domains, which will be crawled and used to train MagicReply.
Helpdesk Articles: Your helpdesk articles are automatically fed to the AI and used when answering your users.
Inbox Messages: Conversations between your team and your users.

It can be used manually by any operator directly from your conversations to quickly generate a response which you can then review, edit, or send to your users to save you time and energy. It can also be integrated into the Chatbot plugin to be fully autonomous and automatically respond to your users from within your scenarios.
This allows you to deploy different types of scenarios to quickly provide initial assistance to your users when they reach out, or provide continuity in your support during out-of-office hours, for instance. This is a great way for your users to obtain assistance while you are unavailable, keeping them engaged on your platform, and diminishing the conversation queue while your team is attending to other conversations.

On top of MagicReply, you will also find various AI components inside of the Chatbot builder, for instance, to automatically suggest articles to your users.

You can find out more about MagicReply and the various resources it can be trained on in this article.

And to help you get started with MagicReply within the Chatbot builder, we also have an in-depth guide available right here.

IV. Enabling Asynchronous Communication and self-service

Live messaging is not always the most productive way for your users to obtain answers to simple questions. Most of your users generally just want a simple answer, a missing piece of information, or a pointer to some resource on your platform. This type of query adds up and can quickly become the main occupation of your support team, for whom time is often precious and must be managed carefully.

The Overlay brings a new approach to mitigate these productivity issues and help your support team focus on where they are needed the most. It is a unique feature allowing you to set up an interactive interface that your users can consult to find help.
Powered by MagicReply (Crisp AI), it is available directly from the Chatbot itself and can also be configured to be displayed to your users before they can chat with your support team.

When your users contact you, you can first prompt them with an interface to which they can directly ask their questions and quickly obtain answers generated by MagicReply, trained on your own resources (Q&A Snippets, Helpdesk articles, online web content...).

You can find a complete setup guide on this article to get started with the Crisp Overlay.

V. Building a Helpdesk

Spending time building a robust knowledge base is worth the effort; it is unequivocally the most efficient way to reduce the workload of your support team and avoid losing leads and engagement during your users' journey on your platform.

A helpdesk is not only a great way to enhance SEO, but it is also fully integrated into the Crisp ecosystem, allowing you to:

Embed the Helpdesk and its articles directly in a dedicated tab of your Helpdesk.
Access quick shortcuts to articles from your Crisp Inbox.
Train MagicReply (Crisp AI) to leverage your resources in multiple ways, including the Bot, MagicReply, or the Overlay.

This is an essential component of your customer service strategy and the most reliable and effective way to provide continuous assistance to your users, making the life of your team smoother and more efficient. Investing in a knowledge base can easily enhance your users' experience and lead to a higher satisfaction rate.

As you should be accustomed to by now, we have you covered with a guide to get started and advice on best practices when building your own Crisp Helpdesk. Don't hesitate checking out this guide to get started 🙂

VI. Routing and Segmenting

There are more features available to help you optimize your support and better handle incoming conversations. Ensuring that you are organized and prepared can help you be more reactive and lower resolution times reliably.

Segmentation allows you to qualify and categorize your conversations.

We discussed Analytics in our introduction, and using segments in your conversations is a great way to monitor the types of requests you receive throughout the day. This data can help you evaluate and address the needs of both your users and agents. Segments also allow you to create dedicated filters to better manage your inbox and can be used within the Chatbot plugin to build customized flows for your different users. This saves time for your agents and reduces hassle for your users when they reach out.

You can read more about the various uses of segments and their benefits in this guide.

Segments are also useful for setting up conversation routing to assign conversations to the most qualified agents based on their requests.

The Routing Rules feature is designed to automatically assign conversations based on various parameters, such as segments, user language, country, custom data, and diverse other metadata. This ensures that conversations receive the attention they need from the most qualified agent available in your inbox. Routing helps you better organize and distribute the workload among your team. It also allows your agents to be more autonomous and responsive by enabling notifications for their own conversations and filtering the inbox to focus on their assigned matters.

Routing rules can therefore also be leveraged within the Chatbot, to help you assess the user's request and ask for them for extra information required by your team when they jump in. We have a[ guide on department routing with the Chatbot](/en/article/how-do-i-create-a-department-routing-chatbot-11f6pij/) to view an example of such use-case.

If you would like to dive deeper and set up automated assignments, don't hesitate to refer to this dedicated article about Conversation Routing.

Conclusion

Scaling customer support and handling high volumes of customer conversations is a challenging aspect of customer service. The different tools and features outlined in this guide can help you significantly alleviate the pressure on your support team and maintain a high quality of customer service.

This is not it of course! Don't hesitate exploring the functionalities available with Crisp, but also the third-party plugins available on our marketplace.
Crisp also offers a complete REST API with an extensive documentation if your team would like to build a custom integration to help you centralize your operations even further, and provide more tools to your agents.

You can also take advantage of features such as Message Shortcuts (canned messages) to create easy and reusable pre-formatted messages to the most common questions your team receives.

It is also important to take your user's feedback into account, to further improve and adapt to your audience's needs, which can be monitored from the Analytics. Feedback can be collected directly from the chatbox, but also automatically attached to the conversation transcript received by your users at the end of the exchange.

Updated on: 04/07/2024