When bots handle conversations with your customers, it's a good idea to keep them out of your regular team inboxes. This means conversations aren't being 'double handled' and your team can focus on conversations that need a human touch. This also lets you exclude bot time from your SLA timers and Inbox reports.
Enable the dedicated bot inbox
To enable the bot inbox, go to Automation > Settings and open Turn on the bot inbox to toggle this on.
The bot inbox will now appear in your list of Teammates inboxes. If you've customized your bot's identity to match your brand, the inbox will show your custom bot icon and name.
You can see conversations being handled by bots in this inbox or in the All inbox.
Important: You cannot manually assign conversations to the bot inbox.
Exclude bot time from your SLAs
When enabling the bot inbox you can check this box to exclude the time conversations spend in the bot inbox from your SLA targets. This means the SLA timer will only begin once a conversation is assigned out of the inbox:
For example:
If you have an SLA of 5 minutes, and leave this setting unchecked:
If a conversation spends 3 minutes in the bot inbox, your team will have 2 minutes to respond within the SLA.With an SLA of 5 minutes and this setting checked:
If a conversation spends 3 minutes in the bot inbox your team will still have 5 minutes from the time when it is assigned out of the bot inbox.
How it works with assignment rules and reports
Assignment rules
With the dedicated bot inbox enabled, inbound conversations with bots will be assigned there first, and your assignment rules will run after the customer has finished the bot path, or told Resolution Bot they’d like to wait for the team. If the conversation doesn’t match any of your rules, it will be assigned to your default assignee, which you can select at the bottom of the rules list.
Important:
When the dedicated bot inbox is enabled, the bot will be set as the assignee of the conversation before any rules get matched. If you have any rules with a condition of 'Teammate assignee is None', you will need to add another condition like 'or Teammate assignee is [bot name]' to ensure the rule will match.
To run assignment rules on a conversation started from an outbound message or bot, create a rule based on the trigger: 'when a customer replies to outbound content'.
Otherwise, conversations where a customer replies to an outbound message or bot will be assigned to the bot inbox first, and moved to the 'Unassigned' inbox after the customer has finished the bot path, or told Resolution Bot they’d like to wait for the team.
If there are any mid-path assignment rules in your Custom Bots, they’ll take effect immediately, and route the conversation out of the bot inbox.
When a conversation is successfully resolved and closed it will still be assigned based on your assignment rules to the correct team or teammate (in their list of closed conversations).
Inbox reports
With the dedicated bot inbox enabled, the Time to close and First response time metrics in your Inbox reports will have a new filter you can apply to include or exclude the time bots spend handling a conversation.
With the bot inbox enabled, you’ll see a new filter on the following Inbox reports:
And in Custom reports you create under Metric
Note: It’s only possible to exclude bot inbox time from your reports for the period since you enabled the bot inbox.
Turning off the dedicated bot inbox
If you decide you no longer want the bot inbox on, you can switch it off at any time.
Resolution Bot conversations will be assigned out of the bot inbox automatically after 3 minutes of inactivity, however if you want to reassign them sooner, you can.
Custom Bot/Workflows conversations will need to be manually reassigned to another inbox.
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