It's important that your customers and leads talk to the right person at the right time. Within your organization, you may have teammates or reps who are responsible for certain territories or you may want your marketing team handle conversations from people who started on your events page! You can create different rules for your Conversation Routing right from within the Drift app!

Billing plan: 

The Default Routing Rule: All Drift plans.

Conditional Conversation Routing rules: Premium plan and above.

Intended Audience:

• Admin
• Marketer

In this Article, we'll go over:

• What Are Routing Rules?
• The Default Rule vs. Conditional Routing Rules
• Creating a Conversation Routing Rule
• Setting the Priority of Your Conversation Routing Rules
• Ensuring Your Conversations are Routing Correctly
• Routing Fallbacks
• Advanced Routing Options
• FAQ and Helpful Tips

What are Routing Rules?

Your Conversation Routing Rules determine who is routed (added as a participant) in a given conversation depending on a set of criteria. For example, routing in sales reps when someone starts a Drift conversation from your pricing page. You can easily specify when, where, and how this happens.

The Default Rule vs. Conditional Routing Rule

All Drift accounts include a Default Routing Rule. Essentially, your Default Rule is your fallback rule.  It should contain one or more teammates who can field a large variety of conversations so that no conversation goes unrouted, should a visitor fail to match all of your other conditional rules, they will be routed towards the Default Rule.

Conditional routing rules are based on a variety of different parameters and are highly customizable. You can craft routing rules based on

• Custom Audience - route based on URL, website behavior, Drift status, etc. For more on Audience conditions, click here .
• Salesforce - route  by Salesforce account, contact, or lead owner (must have Salesforce integrated with Drift )
• Contact Attributes - As of May 2, 2019, you can route based on any standard Drift attribute or custom attribute you've created!

Additional routing rule options for Premium plan customers and above.

• Firmographics -  route based on number of employees, company revenue, and industry (enriched from IP Address, requires Account Based Marketing). 
• Targeted Accounts - route based on the account's owner in Drift (requires ABM)

These two types of rules live in App Settings under Conversation Routing.

 

Creating a Conversation Routing Rule

To create a new routing rule, head to Settings > App Settings > Conversation Routing, or click here.

Click the Create New Rule ("+" icon) button on the page and select Add Condition to be brought to a page where you can set the parameters of your routing rule as seen below.

 

Type in a name for your rule, and then click Add a condition to add parameters for your rule. The condition set builder should look very similar to how you add Audience settings for bot Playbooks!

You now have the option to use Segment lists from Salesforce in your conversation routing. Use the Account Segment option while setting up your routing rules to include or exclude account lists from Salesforce.

Adding Participants to Your Rules

You can add participants to your rules by navigating to the section towards the bottom of the rule you're building called Choose routed teammates

You have two options for which teammate(s) should be routed into a given conversation matching this rule

• Round robin between teammates - route conversations to one or more agents in your instance
• Round robin to a team - route conversations to one individual currently marked as available from one of your Teams  (Teams available on our Premium plan and above)

Click Save when you're finished! 

Note!

Please see this doc  for more details on setting up your Routing Fallbacks!

Setting the Priority of Your Conversation Routing Rules

When routing via your conversation routing rules, your rules are evaluated according to their priority. You can re-order these rules by hovering over any rule and dragging the rule into the desired place.

 

To delete a rule, simply hover over the rule you'd like to delete and click the trash can.

Once you've successfully built out all your rules, you'll want to Publish changes.  To do this, simply click Publish changes at the top right hand side of the screen. 

If you click the ellipsis in the top left hand corner you have the ability to Revert changes in order to undo any changes you've made before publishing.

Another note worth mentioning; while you're using this interface, if you've created a rule that creates a flaw in the workflow, you'll find a warning icon on the top right hand side of the screen.  You can click the icon to find where the error is in your workflow and fix your error.

Additionally, depending on how advanced you make your routing rules you may need to zoom in and out of your flow to examine the details, or perhaps you may need a quick reference to hotkeys.  All this can be accomplished via the tool bar on the right hand side of the UI.

 

Ensuring Your Conversations are Routing Correctly

If you ever have a question of why a conversation routed or didn't route in a way, you can look at the Routing Audit Log within the Conversation View. Whenever a routing rule is used, we explain why your teammate was or was not added, including what Routing Rules they failed to match if they were higher priority in the global Routing Rules list!

 

Since Routing rules respect availability (unless routing to a single person), routing may not occur when all participants in a rule are "away".

To read more about the Routing Audit Log and why your chats may not have routed correctly, read our doc here.

Routing Fallbacks

Check out our Team Routing Fallbacks doc to learn how to make sure all of your chats are getting handled even if no one is around to respond!

Advanced Routing options

So what happens when no one is available, or you need even more options than just these basic routing rules?  Check out our Advanced Routing help doc here to find out what else you can do!

FAQs and Helpful Tips

Tip: Check out the Team Availability Bot Skill in the Chat Widget > Drift Bot Settings which can automatically reroute conversations when the first routed rep doesn't respond!