October 2019

Last update October 21, 2019

What's New?	Learn More
Conversations Improvements	- WhatsApp Templates Supported - Automatic Assignment of conversations to Agents - Start Conversations Improvements - Filters Added in All Work - Agent Permissions Update - New Message Notification - Receiving Rich Media From End Customers - Searching Conversations by Phone Number - Conversations API Improvements
Answering Machine Detection (AMD)	AMD helps you to determine whether a real human or a machine (voicemail inbox) answered your automated outbound calls.

Conversations Improvements

Below is a list of improved features for Conversations:

WhatsApp Templates Supported

WhatsApp templates are mandatory if you want to send either the first message to a customer, or in case 24 hours have elapsed since the last message was received from the customer. Now you can use WhatsApp templates to engage with your customers at any moment directly from the Agent panel.

If more than 24 hours have elapsed since the last conversation with the customer, the agent will see a notification and be able to choose WhatsApp template to get in touch with the customer again.

After the agent clicks Use a WhatsApp Template, they will be able to select one from the list of registered and approved message templates and send a message.

Automatic Assignment of Conversations to Agents

With the automatic assignment, the supervisors will be able to distribute conversations between all available agents based on their availability and skills.

Supervisors will be able to set up default capacity:

• per channel group - number of max concurrent conversations any agent can have per channel group (WA, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Viber)
• per agent - let's say a junior agent can handle two concurrent conversations, and a senior agent can handle up to five concurrent conversations

The automatic assignment can be configured at the Queue level. Whenever a conversation is routed to a queue with an automatic assignment, the system searches for available agents with the least number of conversations and biggest idle time and assigns them to a new conversation.

Start Conversation Improvements

There are a few UX improvements and new scenarios in Start conversation dialog

When initiating a new conversation, agents will have the following options:

• If there is no conversation already open with the end customer, a new one will be created
• If there is a conversation open with the end customer, the agent will be prompted and: 
  • will be able to continue with the conversation if it's assigned to them
  • will not be able to continue with the conversation if it's not assigned to them – in order to safeguard the flow of a meaningful conversationwith the end customer
• Agents will be prompted about WA templates as the mandatory option if more than 24 hours elapsed since the last contact.

Filters Added in All Work

To easily keep track of conversations, you'll be able to filter conversations in All Work by:

• Time frame
• Priority
• Status
• Pending agent reply - supervisors and agents can see how long the end customer is waiting for a reply and react promptly to avoid long waiting time and ensure good customer experience
• Queues
• Agents
• Customers
• Tags

Agent Permissions Update

From now on in All work agents can only access conversations from the queues they are assigned to or conversations from the default queue – this leads to better focus and less clutter.

Agents are no longer able to take over a conversation from another agent, but they can transfer their conversation to another agent within the queue.

New Message Notification

You'll be notified about the new message by system and browser notification. In both cases, when you click on the notification, the conversation will open.

The prerequisite is that you must allow receiving notifications in the browser. The appearance is dictated based on the operating system. The system will ask immediately to allow pop-up notifications from the web interface.

Receiving Rich Media From End Customers

End customers can now send rich media content while having conversations with agents. When the end user sends rich content through an inbound message into a conversation, it will be shown on the agent panel.

Searching Conversations by Phone Number

Agents are also able to search through conversations by end-users’ GSM number. In My work or All work panel, they can enter the number in the search box, and all conversations associated with that number will be listed.

Conversations API Improvements

API now supports rich content and sending WhatsApp templates. With this, our message sending API becomes a comprehensive, channel-agnostic interface for any of the supported channels (SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger).

Voice Answering Machine Detection

By using AMD, our new Voice feature, you can choose whether you want to play the message or hang up the call if an answering machine (voicemail) answers the call on your customers' side. It can be helpful when you are sending automated outbound call campaigns to your customers (outbound IVR, text-to-speech / pre-recorded automated calls, or Click to Call) and you don’t want the message to be played and saved to voicemail.

Automatic Machine Detection can be enabled either via Infobip web interface (via Broadcast and Flow) or via API.