While Fin AI Agent or a customer-facing workflow is active in conversations with your customers, it's a good idea to keep them out of your regular team inboxes. Turning on the bot inbox allows you to automatically assign conversations to a separate bot inbox while a workflow or Fin AI Agent is active.
This means conversations aren't being 'double handled' and your team can focus on conversations that need a human touch. This also lets you exclude bot time from your SLA timers and inbox reports.
Turn on the bot inbox
To enable the bot inbox, go to Settings > AI & Automation > Automation and open Turn on the bot inbox to toggle this on.
The bot inbox will now appear in your list of Teammates inboxes. If you've customized your bot's identity to match your brand, the inbox will show your bot icon and name.
You can see conversations currently being handled by Fin AI Agent or Workflows in this inbox or in the All inbox.
Note:
Turning on the bot inbox assigns conversations where Fin is active to the dedicated bot inbox, which means these conversations aren't in any teammate inboxes (until they are reassigned to them i.e. because a customer asked to talk to support).
This is different to the Fin AI Agent inbox view which allows you to see all conversations where Fin was involved, regardless of who they were assigned to.
You cannot manually assign conversations to the bot inbox.
All assignments from background workflows are deferred until the conversation is moved out of bot inbox, or the matching customer-facing workflow has finished.
Exclude bot time from your SLAs
When enabling the bot inbox you can also check the box "Exclude the time conversations spend in the bot inbox from SLA targets". This means the SLA timer will only begin once a conversation is assigned out of the inbox:
For example:
If you have an SLA of 5 minutes, and leave this setting unchecked:
If a conversation spends 3 minutes in the bot inbox, your team will have 2 minutes to respond within the SLA.With an SLA of 5 minutes and this setting checked:
If a conversation spends 3 minutes in the bot inbox your team will still have 5 minutes from the time when it is assigned out of the bot inbox.
How it works with assignment rules and reports
Assignment rules
With the dedicated bot inbox enabled, inbound conversations with bots will be assigned there first, and your assignment rules will run after the customer has finished the bot path, or told Fin AI Agent they’d like to wait for the team. If the conversation doesn’t match any of your rules, it will be assigned to your default assignee, which you can select at the bottom of the rules list.
Important:
When the dedicated bot inbox is enabled, the bot will be set as the assignee of the conversation before any rules get matched. If you have any rules with a condition of 'Teammate assignee is None', you will need to add another condition like 'or Teammate assignee is [bot name]' to ensure the rule will match.
To run assignment rules on a conversation started from an outbound message or workflow, create a rule based on the trigger: 'when a customer replies to outbound content'.
Otherwise, conversations where a customer replies to an outbound message or bot will be assigned to the bot inbox first, and moved to the 'Unassigned' inbox after the customer has finished the bot path, or told Fin AI Agent they’d like to wait for the team.
If there are any mid-path assignment rules in your Workflows, they’ll take effect immediately, and route the conversation out of the bot inbox.
When a conversation is successfully resolved and closed it will still be assigned based on your assignment rules to the correct team or teammate (in their list of closed conversations).
All assignments from background workflows are deferred until the conversation is moved out of bot inbox, or the matching customer-facing workflow has finished. Any deferred assignments from background workflows are then applied after the matching customer-facing workflow finishes but only if no other assignment was applied.
After 15 minutes of inactivity from the customer, if no auto-close rules are implemented, the conversation will leave the bot inbox and follow your assignment rules.
Inbox reports
With the dedicated bot inbox enabled, the Time to close and First response time metrics in your Inbox reports will have a new filter you can apply to include or exclude the time bots spend handling a conversation.
With the bot inbox enabled, you’ll see a new filter on the following Inbox reports:
And in Custom reports you create under Metric
It’s only possible to exclude bot inbox time from your reports for the period since you enabled the bot inbox.
Turning off the dedicated bot inbox
If you decide you no longer want the bot inbox on, you can switch it off at any time.
Fin AI Agent conversations will be assigned out of the bot inbox automatically after 3 minutes of inactivity, however if you want to reassign them sooner, you can.
Workflows conversations will need to be manually reassigned to another inbox.
Even with the bot inbox turned off, you'll still be able to keep an eye on conversations where Fin was involved using the Fin AI Agent inbox view. But conversations where Fin is active will no longer be assigned to a separate bot inbox.
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