Phoenix Chat

What is this?

Phoenix Chat is a new Live Chat platform from Flow XO. It is designed for organizations with multiple support agents, or even multiple teams of agents, and provides a wide variety of powerful, modern features such as automatic assignment, team and agent schedules, auto-responders for after hours, extended response times, and more.

Do you need to ensure that your sales agents only see their own chats? Or can all your agents claim any chat they want at any time? Or something in between? Flow XO's Phoenix Chat can be configured to handle almost any use case.

Getting Started with Phoenix Chat

Please note that Phoenix Chat app is a separate application from Flow XO. Although the two are tightly integrated to allow seamless handoff of live conversations to and from Live Chat from Flow XO, the live chat app is designed primarily for agents and managers of agents to handle conversations with your customers. Because these types of users rarely or never need to access bot and flow automations, they may log in to the Live Chat app at https://phoenix.flowxo.com. 

Enable and Access Phoenix Chat

Paid users may enroll their organizations into the Phoenix Chat beta and begin using it right away from their Flow XO account profile:

Once you have enabled Phoenix Chat, you and team may access it in one of two ways.

1. From the main Flow XO menu
2. Navigate your browser to https://phoenix.flowxo.com and log in using the same login credentials that were active when you enabled Phoenix Chat. Please note changing your password or e-mail address in Flow XO will NOT change your e-mail and passwords in Phoenix Chat. Once your Flow XO accounts are imported into Phoenix Chat, they are separate accounts. However, you can also log directly into Phoenix Chat without requiring your username or password by clicking 'Phoenix Chat' from the main Flow XO navigation menu.

Integrating Phoenix Chat and your Flow XO Flows

Once enabled, all live chats will automatically flow into Phoenix Chat without you having to make any other changes to your flows. Phoenix Chat does have some additional features, however, that our class Live Chat does not have, such as the ability to assign chats to specific teams or team members, as well as the ability to read and write custom fields to your chat contacts, and and remove tags, and update contact status. To read about the our Phoenix Chat integrations that you can use in your flows, please see this article.

Basics

When you first log in, you will be taken to your dashboard.

The dashboard provides a few basic analytical charts showing chat volume, time to first response and time to resolution statistics, as well as an overview of new vs returning users. The dashboard also presents a list of the most recent chat sessions.

The navigation on the left provides quick access to agent inboxes, the "Contacts" database, as well as the management console where agents can configure their profile, including availability, and admins can configure teams, invite users, and other important settings.

Ongoing live chats will be highlighted with badges in the navigation menu:

Clicking on one of the Live Chat menu items takes you to the Live Chat console:

Claiming Chats

Agents may only communicate with contacts once a live chat has been assigned. If your team is NOT using the auto-assignment rules, then agents will need to claim their chats before communicating with the contact. This is easily accomplished in the live chat console by clicking "Claim Chat":

Contact CRM Features

From the live chat console screen, agents can switch between views, as well as using the navigation items on the left navigation using the category switcher. Chats can also be re-assigned to different team members or different teams from the assignment panel. When the chat is complete, the "End Chat" button should be clicked to close out a chat and remove it from the Open Chats list. This will also add the appropriate timestamps needed for tracking performance. This is also where agents will conduct conversations with users, and can type messages and upload files:

The Live Chat console also includes information about the contact associated with the current chat:

From here you can click the contact name to navigate to the contact record, and add/update email, phone number, and various other aspects of the contact. You can also review prior conversation history from the contact page.

Contacts are also available from the Contact Database:

From here you can search for contacts by name, username, or tag. Hover over a contact in the contact list to see a preview of the contact, and click on the row to navigate to the contact page and conversation history for that contact.

Managing Agents

A Live Chat is not very useful without agents. To add agents to your organization, click on the "Manage" menu item in the left navigation, and then choose "Members"

From here you can manage all of your organizations members, assign them roles, and invite new members. When you invite a new member, you will need to provide their e-mail address and choose their role and optionally the team(s) you want to assign them to.

Once you click "Invite Member", an e-mail will be sent to the specified e-mail address and the invited team member can accept the invitation, where they will have the opportunity to create an account. Once they do so, they will automatically be assigned to the role and teams you selected when inviting them.

Managing Teams

In Flow XO Live Chat, you can create one or more teams. Teams are groups of agents to which live chats may be assigned. A default team named "Inbox" has been created for you, and if you only have one group of agents, you may never need to add additional teams. If you do divide your agents in between departments, you can create as many teams as you like. In the Flow XO bot builder, if you want to assign a particular chat to a particular team, you will have the option of doing so.

Regardless of how many teams you have, each team has some configuration settings that determine how chats are assigned and managed within the team.

From this screen you can change the permission mode for the team, set an optional team availability schedule, and determine if and how agents should automatically be assigned when a new live chat is created.

Permission Modes

The permission mode determines what agents are allowed to do, and what chats they can see. 

Collaborative

The most permissive and basic mode is "Collaborative". In this mode, all agents can view all live chats, can claim chats themselves from the unassigned chats queue, and can re-assign chats to other agents as they see fit. This mode is appropriate for most small teams, as it is the least complicated and offers the most flexibility.

Self Service

Self service is the next least restrictive mode. In "Self Service" mode agents may view any unassigned chats in the unassigned list and claim them when they are ready. However, only supervisors are allowed to re-assign chats, and in this mode agents may not participate in each others conversations. Once a chat is claimed, it is no longer visible to other agents unless the chat is re-assigned to them.

Restrictive

Restrictive mode, as the name implies, is the most locked down. This mode is appropriate for sales teams where live chats are not just customer interactions but represent sales opportunities and agents are competitive with one another. In this mode, chats may ONLY be assigned by auto-assignment rules, supervisors, or via automation in the Flow XO flow builder.

Team Availability Schedule

If your team is only available during certain hours, you can enable the Availability Schedule. Once enabled, a configurable message will be shown when live chats are initiated outside of working hours:

Auto Assignment

The "Auto Assignment" settings determine how live chats will (or will not) automatically be assigned to an agent when they arrive into the queue. 

None

Live chats are not auto-assigned. They will remain in the "unassigned" queue until an agent claims them or a supervisor or automation assigns them to an agent.

Round Robin

Live chats will be assigned to the available agent (based on their availability schedule if set) who has least recently been assigned a chat. Effectively this will simply sign chats on a rotating basis to all available agents. An agent that is not available according to their schedule will be skipped.

Round Robin by Contact

Live chats will be assigned to the last agent to which they were previously assigned. If they have not been previously assigned (they are a new contact) they will be assigned to an available agent who has least recently been assigned a contact.

Round Robin Assignment Options

For Round Robin auto-assign strategies, there are various other options that can tailor how the system behaves when the auto-assigned agent is not available.

For basic "Round Robin" assignment, you can customize the "Assigned Message", which is displayed when an agent is first assigned to a chat, as well as the "unresponsive agent" strategy. 

Unresponsive Agent Strategy

The "Unresponsive Agent" strategy determines how the system should behave when the auto-assigned agent does not engage with the user after a pre-determined amount of time.

No Action

The chat will remain assigned to the assigned agent indefinitely, regardless of how long it takes the agent to engage.

Reassign

The chat will be automatically re-assigned to the next available agent after the timeout period

Prompt

The user will be informed via a configurable message that the agent they were assigned to is not currently available, and will be given the option to be assigned to a different agent. This strategy is mostly useful for Round Robin by Contact scenarios where the contact may already have an affinity with their assigned agent.

Agent Availability

When auto-assignment is enabled, agent availability becomes important since live chats will only be auto-assigned to available agents. To restrict the hours that an agent is available, they may set their availability themselves in the "My Availability" tab of the management console:

Notifications

When an agent is assigned to a live chat, they will receive an e-mail informing them of the assignment, in addition to an audible sound if they have the live chat interface already pulled up in a browser tab. Notifications will also be sent via SMS text message if the agent has specified a valid phone number in their "Profile" in the management console.

That is it for this overview. Please remember that the Live Chat app is beta software, and report any and all bugs or missing features to support@flowxo.com. We are actively working on this product to bring it to market and will be constantly addressing issues as they arise.