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Conversation module - Overview

An overview of key features in the Conversations module

Christian Dreyer avatar
Written by Christian Dreyer
Updated over a week ago

The conversations module is the home of all your customer interactions. From emails, live chat, tickets, logged calls, completed Workflow steps, and meeting notes, every customer interaction is available in a single view.

From the conversations module, you can get insights into your conversations, build alerts based on the content of conversations, create saved filters of conversation groups, send and reply to emails and Intercom messages, manage shared inboxes, know if emails have been read, schedule future sending and label, flag and move any conversation. 

As a CS Leader, it is where you get an overview of exactly how your team is engaging with your clients, and as a CSM it is where you engage and organise all your client communication. In short, there is a lot of power here!  

The conversations module can be accessed by clicking on the speech bubble icon on the sidebar.

If your email is connected to Planhat, at the top of the sidebar you will see a large "New" bubble. Clicking here lets you send an email, or use a template or even populate an email with merge tags.

To learn more about the power of using merge tags, click here.
To learn more about creating email templates, click here.


Filters

The conversation module enables you to create saved Filters that group customer conversations in whatever way you require. For example, if you quickly want to see all recent activities relating to Onboarding, you create a filter on it, or if you want to see all Emails to your Gold customers, you do the same. 

Filter options include:

Labels, Date Periods, Conversation/Activity Type, Subject Lines, Segments, Persona, Owner, Co-Owner, Company, Team Member, End User / Contact, Phone Number, Key Word Search, or Featured.

You can use them independently or together, enabling you to identify any specific group of conversations or activities with any group of clients or end-users possible. 

To add a new filter click 'Add new filter' on the sidebar. 

Default Filters

Out of the box we provide a number of default filters, that will be populated by corresponding conversations. 

Inbox

The Inbox shows all emails, tickets, or chats you have with your customers. It does not include activities as it is focused on your written conversations with customers, regardless of whether they happen in your email, ticketing system, or live chat. 

If the global filter (sidebar filter tool) is enabled, only conversations matching those conditions will appear. For example, if the global filter is selected on a segment, only conversations with those customers will be included in the Conversations module. 

📢 Pro tip: if you're on the email or the sender has the "Public Account Usage" (learn how to enable that setting here) setting enabled then you will be able to reply to the email directly from the Inbox.

Sent

As you might have guessed, the Sent filter show emails, tickets and chat you have sent, either directly from your email, ticketing, or chat tools, directly from within Planhat (emails and Intercom), or automatically via a trigger in Planhat.

Messages sent in Bulk from Planhat, such as NPS surveys or mass emails are sent in batches approximately every 10 minutes. 

Drafts

When you start writing a new email or chat message in Planhat, the message is saved as a draft until it is sent. You can close the message editor and return to your draft later in order to edit the content and send the message. Helpful when your laptop battery runs out in the middle of that important email!

Waiting for Approval

Here we bucket all emails that are automatically generated in Planhat, but have the rule to require manual approval before sending. This is an option for email automations, NPS emails, and Sequence Workflow emails.

📌 Important to note!

We also use this filter to store any emails that may have errors in sending, this can range from merge tag issues to the user that is sending the email not having their email sync enabled.

 

Unassigned

The Unassigned section will only be visible if there are unassigned emails. In Unassigned you'll find emails identified by Planhat as related to one of your customers owing to the email domain, but to a User who does not yet exist in Planhat. You can either discard these emails or assign them to a customer profile and create the related end-users.

When you have multiple customers sharing the same related domain, Planhat does not know where the new contact should be created. This folder will help you find all these cases and assign the email threads accordingly. 

If customers with shared domains are not a major pain point for you don't worry, you can tell Planhat to automatically create new Users on the correct customer account based on the email domain. You can also use a halfway solution to block automatic user creation by domain if it's only an issue for a few of your customers.

📌 Important to note!

This filter is also permission-based, if you do not have permission to view this, you will not see it!

With Me

All communications that are directly with you. 

Starred

All conversations that have been starred on the Customer profile or here in the conversations module. 

Archived

Any archived conversations will show here.


Creating new Filters

Much of the power of the conversations module comes from being able to create custom filters to easily identify and track specific conversation groups. These filters can be shared with the team or kept private. Click 'Add new filter' and you will see the following menu.

  • Type - This setting allows you to either create a standard filter, top list, or bottom list. The top list and bottom list allow you to have an additional layer to your filter to show either the bottom/top results of a specific property with a set limit.

  • Is Public - If enabled other team members can view this filter. Disabling this will only allow you to see this filter.

  • Anyone can edit - If enabled other team members can edit the settings of this filter.

  • Add Rule - filter on conversations that match a specific criteria (e.g. all conversations across team members of your portfolio or conversations belonging to a specific customer Segment or user Persona).

Alerts

The final option in the menu enables you to get notified every time a new conversation meeting the criteria is added to the filter. Using the example above, this is an excellent tool for CS leaders to stay tuned in key customer conversations, either by having an alert every there is communication with high-value clients, or whenever 'red-flag' phrases are used in emails, tickets, or chats. 


Metrics and Automations

While not displayed on the Conversations module, an important thing to remember about Planhat is you can build an automation or metric off of any conversation or activity in the system. For example, a metric showing how many tickets a customer has created in the past 30 days, or an automation that every time an activity of type 'Onboarding' has occurred the following day an email is automatically sent to the customer. 

Speak to your CSM if you would like to talk some of these things through.

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