Once you understand the basics of routing, you might wonder how to configure it for different scenarios, or even what’s possible. This help doc goes through several both common and more complicated routing scenarios and describes how to configure settings appropriately.

For a refresher on routing fundamentals, see:

• Setting Up Conversation Routing Rules
• How to Use Advanced Lead Routing
• Routing Fallbacks

Book a Meeting If Team Is Unavailable to Chat

Scenario

• You’re routing to a team
• The team has online/offline hours set
• You want visitors to book a meeting when the team can’t chat

Setup

1. Go to the team settings for the team in question
2. OR open the routing rule you want to update, and click “Edit Team Settings” in the “If the team is offline” section
3. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab
4. For the Offline fallback setting, choose “Schedule a meeting”
5. (Optional) customize the meeting type and bot message
6. For the Unresponsive Fallback setting, choose the desired options, for example, “Schedule a Meeting”
7. Note that these fallbacks will apply in all situations where a conversation is routed to this team (for example, a playbook skill where you chose to route to this specific team to).

 

Book a Meeting when AE isn’t available

Scenario

• You’re routing to Salesforce/Drift Account owner
• But, you don’t expect the AEs to be available to chat or respond quickly, so you want to offer up their calendar instead

Setup

1. Open the Salesforce/Drift Account owner routing rule you want to customize
2. Choose “Schedule a meeting” for “if the owner isn’t available to accept chats”. This will drop the account owner’s calendar into chat if they’re away, or at their chat limit.
3. (Optional) customize the meeting type and bot message
4. Choose “Schedule a meeting” for “If the routed teammate doesn’t respond”. This will drop the account owner’s calendar into chat if they’re routed into a conversation, but don’t respond in the allotted time

Route Among All Available Reps on a Team, Before Falling Back to Booking a Meeting

Scenario

• You’re routing to a team
• If a rep doesn’t respond, you want to give another rep a chance instead
• If none of the reps respond, fall back to booking a meeting

Setup:

1. Go to the team settings for that team (Settings / Team)
2. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab
3. For the Unresponsive Fallback setting, choose “Re-route within the same team”
4. For the Offline fallback setting, choose “Schedule a meeting”
5. Go to your routing rules and open the routing rule for this team
6. For the “If nobody is available to chat” setting, choose “Use same fallback as when team is offline”

 

Speed to Lead: Route to Account Owner/SDR Team Before Booking a Meeting

Scenario

• You want to route to Salesforce/Drift Account owner first
• But, you don’t expect account owners to be available to chat or respond quickly
• If the account owner isn’t available to chat, fall back to round-robining among the SDR team
• If no one from the SDR team is available, book a meeting with the account owner

Setup:

1. You’ll need 3 routing rules to make this happen. Place these one after another

• A routing rule for the account owner
• A routing rule for the SDR team
• Another routing rule for the account owner. This rule will be used to book a meeting, and must be after the SDR team rule

2. On the first account owner rule, set both the “If the owner isn't available to accept chats” and “If the routed teammate doesn't respond” fallbacks to “Continue on to next rule”. This will direct the chat to the SDR team if the account owner isn’t available
3. Once you’ve created the SDR team routing rule, open the routing rule and click “Edit team settings” to go to the SDR team settings.
4. For the Unresponsive Fallback setting on the SDR team, choose “Re-route within the same team”
5. Note that whatever setting you use for Offline Fallback on the SDR team is irrelevant for this scenario - you’ll be overriding it in the next step
6. Go back to your routing rules and open the routing rule for the SDR team again. For the “If the team is offline” and “If no teammates are available for routing” settings, choose “Continue to next rule”. This will ensure that when no one from the SDR team is available to chat, that the meeting gets booked with the account owner instead of a member of the SDR team
7. On the second account owner routing rule, set both the “If the owner isn't available to accept chats” and “If the routed teammate doesn't respond” fallbacks to “Schedule a meeting”

Route to a Live Rep During Online Hours / Send an Away Message During Offline Hours

Scenario

• You’re routing to a team
• The team has online/offline hours set
• You want to send an away message during offline hours
• If a rep is routed in but doesn’t respond, attempt to round-robin to another team member

Setup

1. Open the routing rule for the team
2. Click “Edit team settings” in the “If the team is offline” section. This will bring you to the settings for the team
3. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab

1. For Offline Fallback, choose “Send an away message”. Customize the message
2. For Unresponsive Fallback, choose “Re-route to another team member”
3. (Optional) Go back to the routing rule for the team
4. For “If nobody is available to accept chats”, choose what you want to happen after re-routing to another team member exhausts all available team members

1. Send an away message
2. Schedule a meeting
3. Continue on to next rule to attempt routing in another live agent from a subsequent routing rule

 

Advanced Scenarios

Ignore Visitors from a Segment

Scenario

• You have a segment of visitors who you never want to route to a rep (maybe it’s partners, competitors, or internal employees)
• You’ve already set up an account segment to represent these visitors
• Your playbooks are not able to effectively filter out all instances of these visitors

 

Setup

1. Create a dummy team that is always offline. The team does not need to have any team members
2. Create a routing rule that matches visitors from the segment you want to ignore
3. Specify to route to the dummy team you created in step 1
4. Add an away message fallback for “When the team is offline” to send to these visitors

Local/Regional Team

Scenario

• Local team consists of a few teammates (not an official team) and should be routed in first
• There’s a larger, regional team that consists of all the reps from several local teams, and is an actual team in Drift

 

Setup

1. This will require two routing rules - one for the local team, and one for the regional team. The regional team rule should follow the local team
2. Create the routing rule for the local team.
3. Click “Edit team settings” in the “If the routed teammate doesn't respond for 30 seconds” section
4. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab

1. For Unresponsive Fallback choose “Re-route within the same teammates” - if the first person routed in doesn’t respond, this will route in another local teammate, until all available teammates have been exhausted.
2. Go back to the routing rule for the local team
3. For “If nobody is available to accept chats” choose “continue to next rule” - this will move on and continue trying to route to someone in the larger regional team
4. (Optional) set the desired fallback behavior(s) on the regional team

24-Hour Support

Scenario

• You have 3 global support teams spread around the world
• The support teams are on staggered, 8 hour shifts to give 24 hours of total coverage
• If a support chat happens outside of working hours, send an away message asking the visitor to chat back during working hours.

Setup

1. Go to team settings for each team, and:

1. Configure each team’s availability hours (in Team settings) to match the hours reps will be online
2. In the “Routing Fallbacks” tab, set the fallback for “Offline Team” to send an away message.

2. Go to your Conversation Routing Rules
3. If applicable, create a branch in your routing rules for any support-related chat routing. Keeping all support-related routing rules in a branch will simplify future maintenance
4. Create a routing rule for each team in the support branch. For each rule, use the Country condition to route visitors from the countries in the region to their respective support team

 

SDR team with Irregular Hours

Scenario

• Team has availability hours configured
• BUT, agents tend to be available for chat outside of the team’s online hours
• You want to book meetings when no agents are available, but ignore team offline hours

Setup

1. Go to the team settings for the SDR team (Settings / Team)
2. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab
3. For “Offline fallback”, choose “Disregard team’s availability” option
4. Optional: configure an unresponsive fallback for the team - for example, “Re-route to another teammate”
5. Go to your Conversation Routing Rules and open the routing rule for the SDR team
6. For “If nobody is available to accept chats”, choose “Schedule a meeting”
7. With these settings, the team availability hours will be ignored, but site visitors will have the option to schedule a meeting if all agents are offline

 

Support agents w/ Enterprise Re-route Queue

• The team you’re routing to has availability hours setup
• You’re using the “Reroute conversations with no participants” option (a.k.a. Enterprise Re-route Queue)
• Your support agents have a relatively low chat limit
• You want to send an away message during offline hours, but use the Enterprise Reroute Queue during online hours

Setup

1. Go to the team settings for your support team (Settings / Team)
2. In team settings, go to the “Routing Fallbacks” tab
3. For “Offline team”, choose “Send an away message” option
4. Optional: customize the away message
5. Optional: configure an unresponsive fallback for the team, for example “Re-route to another teammate”
6. Go to your Conversation Routing Rules and open the routing rule for the support team
7. For “If nobody is available to accept chats”, choose “Continue to next rule”. This will ensure that chats are enqueued in the Enterprise Re-route Queue if all agents are at their chat limit