Hi everyone, I’m Ben 👋
I’m the Director of Support at Drift, which means I spend most of my time building and leading a team that directly supports our customers, brainstorming and implementing ways to improve your experience with Drift, and sharing my steadfast opinion that a hot dog is not a sandwich. (Yes, I’m really serious about this last one and am open to discussing/debating it with anyone, anytime. Chat with me here.)
Our team talks to customers daily. And guess what? We noticed a lot of you had the same questions. So we decided to launch a new series to address some of the most common questions we get from customers and share our advice for how to solve them. Starting today, we will be sharing our go-to tips, tricks, and best practices once a month to make sure you are getting the most out of Drift.
This month, you asked how you could better understand one of the core features within Drift: conversation routing.
Read on to learn ways you can make the most of this feature and best practices to share with your teams who use Drift every day.
Don’t want to wait a month? Keep up with Drift updates and see how other customers are using them in the Drift Community.
Conversation Routing Rules
What Is a Routing Rule?
Conversation routing rules determine who is routed (or added as a participant) to a conversation depending on a pre-determined set of criteria. For example, you want to route a sales rep into a Drift conversation that starts on your pricing page (versus your homepage).
Check out this Insider Training on Conversation Routing Rules.
Default vs Conditional Routing
The default routing rule is your last rule if no other criteria is matched. Think of this as your ultimate fallback plan. Once you set up conditional routing you need a rule to rely on if the conversation doesn’t apply to any of your settings. Conditional routing is exactly what it sounds like: a set of rules (conditions) that need to be matched in order to route to a specific person or team. The most common scenario we see this used is for regionally based teams (North America, EMEA, APAC, etc.). You could also use this based on other criteria such as industry or company size to route to specific sales teams.
Check out this Help article to learn more about Conversation Routing Rules.
Check out this Insider Training on Advanced Routing.
Team Routing Fallbacks
Sometimes your team doesn’t respond when they are routed in – and you don’t want to leave your prospect or customer waiting in limbo. For this reason, we created Team Fallbacks to take action in these scenarios. There are three main types of fallbacks to ensure you never miss a prospect:
- Offline fallbacks are options to avoid routing a conversation to a teammate/team who is not available to chat. In other words, it’s a proactive fallback to avoid routing in chat reps who won’t be there to respond.
- Unresponsive fallbacks are for when someone is routed in but doesn’t respond.
- Meeting fallbacks are for scenarios where you use conversation routing to book a meeting but you aren’t able to (e.g. because the teammate calendar isn’t connected or no one is available).
Check out this Help article to learn more about Team Routing Fallbacks.
Salesforce Routing Rules
If you are on the Advanced or Enterprise plans, you have access to Salesforce Routing Rules. This is a great feature to leverage if you’re already syncing with Salesforce and have mapped users who own specific accounts. It goes without saying that it’s extremely valuable to bring the right person to the right conversation. And if you’re already doing the work mapping inside of Salesforce, then we recommend leveraging that inside of Drift.
Check out this Help article to learn more about Salesforce Routing Rules.
Best Practices
Chat User
As an end-user in chat, one of the most useful tips is to set your status as ‘away’ before signing out. This will prevent you from being routed into conversations when you aren’t there to take the chats with your prospects. You can do this by following these two simple steps before signing out of Drift:
- Click on your profile icon in the bottom left corner of your screen.
- Click the toggle to mark yourself as ‘away.’
Reviewing Routing in Conversations
A very common question we get in chat is, “why was this person routed (or not routed) into this conversation?” This is something you can check inside of each conversation by following these steps within each individual conversation:
- Expand the Conversation Info panel on the right-hand side of the screen.
- Under Routed to click View Audit Logs.
- Review the routing rules to see details.
- Click Review teammate availability to see who was available at the time of routing.
Got more questions? Our team is here for you. Visit the Drift Help Center for product documentation, service updates, and more.
