What Is Routing?
Assign or redirect requests, messages, and conversations to the appropriate user or department. Set up automatic routing and add any conditions for re-routing.
How Do I Create Routes?
- Click on the lightning bolt header to go to Automation > Routing
- + Add Route will allow you to begin creating your routing rules
- Similar to Variants, the first route the conversation matches in the list will take priority.
- Name the route and + Add Conditions to specify in which situations should Akia route the conversation to the specified Recipient (this can be a department or an individual user)
If a guest messages in and they don’t apply to any of the routing rules, all users will be notified of their message
Example Routing Rules
I have a weekday during business hours team, weekday off-hours team, and a weekend team, how can I set up my routing for these departments?
- Create the different departments in Staff & Departments
- Go to the Routing page and set up your first condition for your weekday, regular business hours team
- If your business hours are 9 am - 5pm, specify the conditions like below (think of “greater than” as moving clockwise and “less than” as counterclockwise)
- Specifying ALL ensures that a guest can only be routed to the Weekday Staff if they’re messaging between 9-5 on a weekday
- We will then create another route for the after hours weekday staff like below
- Because routing rules are by priority, we do not have to specify the current time conditions since this route is added (and prioritized) lower than the Weekday Regular Hours Shift above
- Finally, we can add the weekend shift route by specifying the days of the week
- If you also have specific times the conversation should be routed, you can configure the current time condition like in step 2
- View all of the routes together and the priority they show up. Clicking the ^ and v arrows in the Priority column will change them. In this situation, you can freely swap the Weekday After Hours Shift and Weekend Shift routes with no issues, but if you swap the Weekday Regular Hours Shift to be lower priority than the Weekday After Hours Shift, no messages will be sent to the Weekday Regular Hours Shift since there is no Current Time condition on the Weekday After Hours Shift route.
I have concierge for specific rooms, how can I ensure that the concierge is only sent messages pertaining to them?
- Go to the Routing page and set up your condition(s)
- Specify which guests should be routed to the concierge based on their room number(s) or room type(s)
- In will allow you to list multiple rooms or a range (e.g. 100-200) of rooms, but the verbiage has to match exactly how we get them from your PMS
- Equals checks the verbiage exactly how you input it into the text field with the guest’s reservation to make sure it matches - be careful of punctuation!
- Contains will check the entire field for the guest to see if the specified text is included (in this case, if “blue” is used in the room number)
- Selecting ANY allows Donnie to be routed any messages from guests staying in any of the below room types - specifying ALL would cause the route to not work since a guest couldn’t be in all of those room numbers at once
- Optionally add more routes if needed, otherwise all users will notified if a guest messages in that isn’t part of Donnie’s specified route
Routing rules only apply if nobody is connected with the guest when they message in. If someone is already connected, the conversation will not be automatically forwarded to the user/department.
Use Cases
- 🖥️ Shift Management: Route conversations to different departments based on the time of day and day of the week the guest is messaging in so the appropriate users are being notified.
- 👑 VIP or Owner messages: only want a specific department to receive messages from these sources? Add the condition to filter for Owner or VIP is true and select ANY.