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Auto Answer now available for digital interactions

Digital auto-answer of inbound interactions on the queue

Genesys has announced that Genesys Cloud CX administrators may now enable auto-answer on digital channel queues to automatically answer digital interactions.  Whilst this has long been available in the voice channel it has not been possible with Digital, like email, SMS, WhatsApp, Web-Chat, Web-Messaging, but is coming to Genesys Cloud CX on the 21st of June 2023.

It's understandable why this may not always be a good idea

Auto-answer of an interaction really only makes sense in real-time communications, like voice.  Acceptable time to answer is a challenging question in eServices channels like email or SMS messaging.  The general CX community consensus is that the average to to answer for a short message must be less than 20 minutes, as a response later than this 20 minute window is regarded by the participants as being a new thread, not a response to the original thread.  Email is even more challenging.  Most enterprises are quite happy to let emails sit in queues for up to 72 hours or longer, simply sending out an auto-responder thanking the participant for their email automatically and then let it sit for days before someone looks at it.  Modern communications with younger 'audiences' require a fresh approach.  SMS needs to be responded to within 20 minutes.  What about a WhatsApp for Business message?  What about a Facebook private message?  What about a Twitter Direct Message?  The changing mode of web-chat from a stateful interaction that has a defined start, body and stop sequence to the chat disappears when you use Web-Messaging, therefore moving into a session based mode where you can keep a thread open even with sporadic follow up for many days, with the customer able to carry on where they left off days before in the active session.

Use this power of auto-answer with care

So, think carefully about the channel, the expected and desired customer behaviour, and map it carefully to the agent behaviour and your queue configurations.  Some queues will need auto-answer because they are real-time, like web-messenger, others less so, like SMS where some delay is expected.  Don't forget about the power of AI, automation and BOT frameworks and dialogue flows for digital too.  You can build a really nice visualIVR front end to real-time communications, yes, even web-messenger, so that you customers can blend self-service and assisted service in a single interaction session.  Use the Knowledge Centre in conjunction with Buttons, department and intent mining, use slots and intents at the front-door, even in a real-time communications channel like messenger.

Prerequisites

This feature requires one of the following subscriptions: Genesys Cloud CX 1 Digital Add-on II, Genesys Cloud CX 2, Genesys Cloud CX 2 Digital, Genesys Cloud CX 3, Genesys Cloud CX 3 Digital.