Conversation data attributes allow your team to handle conversations efficiently and consistently, from start to finish. Your customers can provide context up front without the hassle of a form, and Workflows can update conversation attributes automatically. This categorisation can then be used in Inbox Views, Workflows, and reporting.
Before you can benefit from using conversation data, you’ll need to define the attributes that are most useful for you. The data you choose, should help you design and manage the perfect support workflows for different types of conversations.
Conversation attributes for context
First, sit down with your support team and define the ideal pieces of information you’d use to get context when picking up a conversation. Some examples to consider:
How urgent is it? — Is it low (E.g. feature request), or high (E.g. someone locked out of their account).
Which area of your product does it relate to? — Or which product, if you have more than one.
What type of conversation is it? — Bug report, ‘How to’ question, Feature request etc.
What stage is the conversation at? — Being investigated, Waiting for a bug fix etc.
Conversation attributes for other teams
Next, think about the kind of valuable information you could pass on to other teams from your conversations. Feedback for your product team, trends for your leadership team, customer quotes for your marketing team. Some more examples:
Feature or release — Let your product team observe conversations about their latest launch in real-time with Inbox Views.
Product sentiment — Positive, Neutral, or Negative. See trends here in addition to Customer satisfaction with your support experience.
Quotable — True or false. Give your marketing team a library of resources, easily filtered by other attributes also.
Conversation attributes for reporting
Many of the examples above also provide useful dimensions to filter your reports by. For example:
See your team’s effectiveness with different conversation types.
Measure and improve responsiveness to different levels of urgency.
Conversation attributes for automation
You may have automations in place that you’d like your team to have some control over, a way for them to set exceptions to a Workflow for example. To achieve this, create conversation attributes that work like settings.
As an example, if you have a Workflow that assigns conversations after they’ve been waiting for a certain amount of time, you could create a boolean (true/false) conversation attribute called ‘Time assign’, and if your teammates set this to ‘False’ it won’t match the filters for the Workflow to trigger.
Or if you have teammates being mentored or trained, you could set up an Inbox View for their mentor to monitor, that only shows conversations they’ve marked as needing a second opinion. E.g. with a conversation attribute called ‘Mentor assist’ which they can set to ‘True’
Other conversation attributes unique and useful to your business
At the end of the day, no one knows your business like you do, so there are probably many other attributes you’d find useful for your inbox, or as filters for Inbox Views, Workflows, or reports.
You can always edit conversation attributes after you’ve created them, so it’s easy to experiment and tweak based on feedback from your team.
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