Conversation Urgency

Conversation Urgency is a number that indicates how important it is to handle the conversation relative to other conversations. Urgency is used to sort conversations in the Needs Help section of the Live Conversations navigation.

The Urgency is a hint, and Live Conversations and the exact behavior may differ in the future to maximize agent productivity and improve customer experience.

The current sort order in Needs help is as follows:

• First conversations are sorted by urgency from the highest to the lowest, with conversations that have no urgency set at the bottom.

• All conversations with the same urgency are sorted from the longest waiting to the shortest waiting.

How to Manage Urgency

You can set the urgency in two contact points:

• When embedding Universal Chat. This enables you to set the initial urgency for the conversation.

• Update the value from Your Logic. You can update urgency using Conversation Update action send from Your Logic. You can change the value over the course of the conversation based on your business criteria.

Factors for Urgency Computation

Salted CX leaves it up to you how you calculate the conversation urgency or whether you use urgency at all. Here are a few factors you can consider:

• Channel. In each channel the customer may have different expectation on how soon they will get a reply. You typically want to handle web chats first as customers may leave the page, messaging apps such as WhatsApp second as there is no risk of the customer leaving the page and mails last as the expectation for response times are typically lower.

• Reason for contact. You can have a menu, automatic reason detection or other mechanisms that tell you what type of request does the customer have. You might categorize these reasons and put reasons that require timely resolutions first — for example if a customer is in the airport and they have issue with the departure there is a time constrain for the resolution.

• Severity. The actual or perceived severity of the customer issue. For example customers asking for a refund may be sorted from the highest requested refund value to the lowest.

• Customer business value. You might want to handle the most important customers first. You can decide based on the total business value the customer generated in the past, potential future generated value, etc. For example customers who need help to unblock purchasing high value product or a service might get a urgency.

• Sentiment, mentions of legal action, asks for escalations to managers. You can use the content of conversations to decide for urgency based on the customer frustrations, requests for supervisors/managers, mentions of threats, etc.

• Customer reputation. You might use customer reputation to deprioritize customers that take significant amount of your agents time to talk about low-value requests. If the customer has a really bad reputation (fraud attempts, frequent unjustified request) you can even decide not to ever let them talk to the agent and force completing the conversations with them.

• Repeated contact. Repeated contact may indicate unresolved ongoing requests and may lead to customer frustration and you might want to prioritize conversations that were re-opened by the customer.

The decision on which factors to use and what weight to assign to each is entirely up to you. You are not limited to the options above. You can also use different strategies for calculations.

Urgency Tiers

One strategy for calculating urgency is to put conversations into tiers, then let Salted CX sort them within each tier by how long the customer waits. This is typically very easy to understand and leaves most of the granular prioritization to the waiting time.

A typical example is channel-based tiers:

The tiers can be multi-level:

In this example, the Channel has urgency over Reason. We multiply the Channel urgency by a value greater than the highest urgency a Reason has to ensure that lower-urgency channels do not overflow into higher-urgency channels. You can use more levels if needed, using the same principle.

Weighted Urgency

You can choose to manage urgency entirely based on the weight of individual factors that contribute to it. This enables very granular control, but you have to be careful not to produce unexpected orders. It also allows a high-urgency email to be above a low-urgency chat.

First, you decide the weight for individual factors:

Then you assign urgency to the individual values in a given factor:

The final urgency is then a weighted sum of those values. For example: WhatsApp Channel, Legal Reason, High Severity for a Low Value Customer would be calculated as (Channel Weight x WhatsApp Urgency) + (Reason Weight x Legal Urgency) + (Severity Weight x High Urgency) + (Customer Business Value x Low Value Urgency) = (5 x 2) + (3 x 5) + (2 x 3) + (2 x 1).

Tiers with Weighted Urgency

This is a combination of the previous two methods. You can strictly separate urgency into tiers based on certain factors, and then assign a weight within each tier. This makes ordering more predictable at a high level and maintains detailed control at the lower level.

This is useful when you want to guarantee clear segmentation on the high level (eliminating one disadvantage of the Weighed Urgency).