What is email backlog?

Emails generally have a longer SLA for first responses compared to live customer communication, allowing more flexibility in agent scheduling. The response time SLA is valid only during business hours, meaning that if customers email over the weekend, sufficient agents must be scheduled on Monday to address the backlog and meet the SLA requirements.

For more context on email backlog, and how Assembled allows you to visualize email backlog, see this article: https://support.assembled.com/hc/en-us/articles/6138360516365-Email-SLA-and-Backlog-Forecasting

How can Assembled Assist help?

Backlog sweeper combines the powers of Assembled’s backlog reporting with Agent Assist’s resolution paths and auto replies.

Note that this feature is still in Beta, so if you’re interested please reach out to your CSM or support@assembledhq.com.

How it works

Assembled Assist can answer agent questions and write customer replies. Replies can be auto-sent when the backlog is unmanageable. He does this by:

1. Selecting tickets that are part of the unmanageable backlog
2. Identifying which of these questions Assembled Assist can easily answer (questions that have an available Resolution Path)
3. Enabling quick replies to these questions:
   1. Automatically sending these replies to customers 
   2. Providing a list of these replies for you to review and quickly send in a batch

Assuming you have that setup already, here’s how we can you setup Backlog management:

1. We first export a list of tickets in your backlog that need a reply. 
   • Alternatively, you can also provide your own tickets that you’d want Assist to help generate replies to. Note that you don’t need to do any type of filtering yourself, that will be handled by the magic of Assembled Assist 🪄
2. Assist will sift through all of these tickets, and generate a reply for you.
3. You can then configure Assist to either:
   1. Save the reply, so you can inspect all of the generated replies in a single view. You then have the option to select which replies you’d want to then auto send, and which you’d want to save for an agent to review manually.
   2. Automatically send a reply immediately after Assist picks a ticket that can be solved using a resolution path, with no manual inspection required.

Typically, we’d recommend trying out option 1 for your first few tickets, and make sure Assist is accurately replying to the tickets. After, you can go ahead and have Assist automatically sweep up the remaining tickets in your backlog, without any further manual intervention.

This feature has a few pre-requisites:

• Configured + evaluated resolution paths
• Assembled email backlog setup