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Leveraging Fin for email channel - manageable workarounds?

  • 22 April 2024
  • 5 replies
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H

Hi there! 

We are starting out our usage of Fin pretty conservatively. Our approach is to only enable Fin outside of our open hours. This way the customer doesn’t have “much too lose” by giving Fin a chance as worst case they don’t get relevant help but they wouldn’t have a chance to speak to human until tomorrow anyways.

My problem with this approach is that we only have about 25% new conversations starting through chat, and 75% from emails. So the potential impact of Fin is pretty limited. 

Understanding that Fin can’t be enabled in the email channel (yet), I was thinking about workarounds. One option that I considered was to have a reply in the workflow for emails coming in outside work hours, where I tell the customer something like “we’re currently closed. But if you go to <url of web app> you can chat with Fin who might be able to help you out immediately”. 

Where I think this becomes a problem is that if the customer go to the web and tries to send a message through the web interface, he/she will not see the email message they just sent. So there will be one more conversation started. Let’s now say Fin didn’t manage to resolve the issue. Next morning, we’ll have two new conversations for the team to manage and a real risk that two different human agents start working on them in parallel. 

Can anyone see a way to resolve this challenge? Is there a way to connect the two conversations?

Or can you see some other way for me to give email channel customers a chance to get immediate help throgh Fin? 

Thanks for your help!!

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Best answer by Jacob Cox 28 April 2024, 00:55

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Charlie P
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Hi Henrik :)

A specific solution to the problem of how to prevent teams seeing duplicate chats in the morning, would be to configure Fin’s handover to be useful - i.e. it could try and resolve the customer query, and then provide options like “that answered my question” and “I still need help”. Depending on the customer’s choice, Fin could leave a note for the team saying something like “this customer raised a ticket via email then got in touch via the web and [I solved the issue, so you can ignore the email]/[I wasn’t able to solve the issue, so I’ve closed this ticket and please respond via email]”. The “I still need help” answer could respond with “no problem, the team will respond to your original email”.

You might be able to do the above using Fin profiles and handover settings, but I’m not entirely sure myself.

As an aside, are you happy with 25% of support queries coming through email? I find that inbound email queries benefit from far fewer automations, rules and AI functionality than chat, so we effectively don’t offer email support - everything has to come in via the chat. Obvs some customers reply to old chat emails etc so it isn’t 100%. All businesses different of course!

H

Hi @Charlie P  and thank you for your thoughts! 

I’m not entirely sure I understand your proposed solution. I am aware that after Fin has tried to respond, you give the customer the options “that helped” or “talk to a person”. But after “that helped” I don’t seem to be able to connect any further steps to the workflow (the connector to that option just says “resolved”), is there a way I’m missing?

The other part of your solution, how can Fin realize that there was a separate thread from the same user that might be connected? Is there possibilities for Fin to search for other conversations and take action? If so, please help me understand how that can be done 🙏

Charlie P
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There’s a section within the settings of a Fin Profile called “How Fin should hand over”, which allows you to create further steps after a customer asks to speak to the team. It might be worth checking out.

Re: the second part, yes good point. So you’ll have some people raising normal chats, and others who are raising chats having been advised to from your email. I suppose you could include a link in your first email reply to a page that launches the messenger, and then have a Fin Profile with custom content specifically for chats raised from that page. Might be more hassle than its worth though.

Jacob Cox
Userlevel 4
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Hey there @Henrik Lenerius !

For now, I think the solution that you’ve proposed where you direct those Email conversations created during out of office hours to reach out via the Messenger (where they can get support from Fin) is the best option. We have a notification that pops up as a note in a conversation if a User has multiple conversations opened with your team within the last 10 hours. This should allow your team to get a heads up if a customer has started multiple conversations on the same topic.

Something that I always do as well is to take a glance at the Recent Conversations app in the right-hand sidebar to see if the User has recently written in on another thread. Then I take a quick look to see if it’s on the same topic or a different one. If it’s on the same topic, I’ll close one of them as a duplicate in order to ensure all communication is going through a single admin.

The good news is that we are working on building out Email functionality for Fin! We are aiming to release this sometime in July of 2024, though there is always potential for delays. 

Jacob | Sr. Technical Support Engineer at Intercom
H

Thanks a lot @Jacob Cox ! 

I was not aware about the notification of potential duplicates, that should help! 

And most importantly I’m excited that there is a public timeline to launching Fin for email!

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