Organization of a chat center based on the Omnichannel Rocket.Chat module

Hi all! Today I want to tell you how you can quickly and easily organize a full-featured chat center based on the corporate OpenSource messenger Rocket.Chat, using the Omnichannel module.

I’ll tell you what the Omnichannel functionality is and why it is needed. This module allows you to communicate with external clients, contractors and partners in one window of the Rocket.Chat corporate messenger. You can organize a full-fledged chat center to receive messages from the website or from any external messengers and social networks with flexible routing of incoming calls between chat center operators, viewing statistics, connecting to a CRM system and much more.

Preparation

In this article, I will show you how to basicly set up the Omnichannel functionality for testing it. As the article progresses, we will analyze in more detail what this module is and tell you about the main settings and use cases.

We will implement a scheme with 4 agents for receiving external applications, 1 manager (moderator) and set up routing for receiving applications from the website and from Telegram. So let's get started.

Let's open the Omnichannel settings. To do this, go to Rocket.Chat under the administrator account and select a separate item in the drop-down menu “Omnichannel Settings”

We will be taken to the initial settings page. We are immediately shown current chats with clients, where communication is currently taking place, and we can also see the history of already closed chats.

Let's start setting up by adding agents that will receive incoming messages. To do this, let's go to the “Agents” section. In the Login field, select agents and click on the “Add representative” button. In our scenario, I add 4 users: Agent1, Agent2, Agent3 and Agent4. All of them will accept questions from the site and, in addition, Agent3 and Agent4 will accept applications from Telegram.

After we have added agents, we need to create departments in order for us to receive questions from clients. Let's go to the “Departments” tab.

On this tab, click on “Create department” and fill in the fields. We need to create 2 departments: Store and Telegram to implement our scenario. The Store department will include all agents, and the Telegram department will include Agent3 and Agent4.

Let’s create the “Store” department:

Let's enable this section. We indicate the name and enter a description of this department. You must specify an email address where received messages will be sent during non-working hours. We will also indicate a channel in Rocket.Chat for receiving messages during non-working hours of the department. We will indicate the maximum number of simultaneous chats for department employees. If this number is exceeded, new requests will be queued for processing

Let's set the time in seconds for how long to wait for an external user before considering him to have left the chat. Let's enter a message for those users who fall into the queue. We will indicate the department to which agents can forward user requests.

And we will add agents to this department. Also, we can specify parameters for balancing incoming messages between agents of a given department.

By analogy with the “Shop” department, we will add another Telegram department

Let's add a manager (moderator). This person will have access to statistics and Omnichannel settings. He will also be able to view any chat between the agent and the client. He can write to any chat with an external client, and the agent can ask the manager for help if he has difficulties answering a question. Open the Managers menu item:

Click on the “Add manager” button and select the required user from the list.

We have completed the basic setup of Omnichannel and can already accept incoming requests from clients.

Now let's look at the settings for balancing incoming messages and setting up a web form.

Setup and testing

Let's go to the administrative settings of Rocket.Chat: Workspace – Settings – Omnichannel Settings

On this page we are interested in setting up the routing of incoming requests. Scroll down the page and expand the Routing options

There are 5 types of routing of incoming messages between agents. Automatic, Manual, Load Balancing, Load Transfer and External Service.

Automatic routing – new incoming chats are routed to the agent who currently has the least active chats open. If there are agents who have the same number of open chats, then the new incoming chat is transferred to the agent who is higher on the list.

Manual routing – With this setting, all new chats end up in a separate tab for agents – Livechat Inbox. Agents can take chats from this tab themselves and process them by clicking on the “Take this!” button.

Load balancing – This option is only available in the Premium version. This algorithm takes into account both the online status of the agent and the duration of chat correspondence and, based on these parameters, distributes incoming chats between agents. Example: if the first agent often has the “Away” status, then the algorithm will assign more incoming chats to him than to the second agent, who was constantly online and chatting with clients.

Load transfer – Incoming chats are distributed without taking into account already open chats with agents and the history of closed chats. The algorithm simply goes in circles. This option is a cross between Automatic Routing and Load Balancing.

One of the important parameters on the routing settings page is the “Assign new conversations to bot agent” option. It allows you to install a bot as the initial handler of incoming requests from users, which can have a response selection menu. The bot can route incoming chats between different departments.

For our scenario, we will choose manual routing of incoming chats.

Now we can check how receiving requests via a web form works. To test, go to the page https://”Your Rocket.chat URL”/livechat and click on the Rocket.chat icon at the bottom right of the page. A request form will open in front of us.

Fill in the Name and Email fields and write a message

We have set the routing of requests in manual mode, so we are waiting for an agent to pick up our question and answer it. Let's go get the agent

We have received a new message that we can take into account and respond to.

Let’s check that the agent’s response has also been received by the client.

The code for embedding the widget on the site is available in the Livechat settings: Omnichannel Settings – Livechat Installation

Integration

Next, we’ll set up Omnichannel integration with Telegram. To do this, in the Store section, activate the Telegram application

Reception of requests from Telegram will be carried out using a bot. Any external user can write to the bot and his message will be sent to Omnichannel inside Rocket.chat.

Let's go to the “Settings” tab

In order to launch integration with Telegram, we need to enter two parameters: Telegram Bot Token and Default Department Id or Name

You can create a new bot and get its token through the BotFather bot https://t.me/BotFather Let's launch this bot and enter the command /newbot. After this, we will need to specify the bot's name. As soon as we enter the name, BotFather will create a new bot and send a message like this, which will contain the token we need:

Copy the entire token and paste it into the settings of the Omnichannel integration application with Telegram

And we will also indicate the department that will receive incoming messages. In our case, this will be the “Telegram” department.

Setting up the Omnichannel connection with Telegram is complete. Now we can check how this combination works. Let's open our bot using the link from the message with the token and launch it

On the Rocket.chat side we will see a new message. Let's take it and answer it

Let's check that our message reached the user in Telegram

As we can see, the external user received a message sent by Agent3 from Rocket.chat. These integrations allow you to receive requests from external users from different platforms and respond to them from one corporate messenger, Rocket.chat. Reception of requests from: SMS, Email, Telegram, WhatsApp and any integration via Webhooks is supported.

Control

Now I will tell you a little more about the manager's (moderator's) capabilities. Let's go to Rocket.Chat under the manager's account. We can immediately see that he has access to the Omnichannel settings

The main feature of the manager is that he can monitor all open and closed chats. View chat history and, if necessary, join a chat with a client.

Let's open an active chat.

We will see all the correspondence between the agent and the client, and if necessary, we can join the chat.

Let's check if our message was received by the client

As we have seen, the message from the manager is visible to the external client.

The manager also has access to analytics and monitoring of customer requests in real time. Let's go to the Analytics tab

Here we can see how many new requests there were for the selected period of time. How many conversations are currently open, how many are on hold, how many total messages have been sent, what is the busiest day and busiest time. There is also a graph available that can show how many conversations there were, the average duration of one conversation, or how many messages were sent:

Let's go to the Real-time Monitoring tab.

On this tab we can monitor the productivity of agents. The manager sees statistics and graphs of external requests, on the basis of which he can evaluate the productivity of agents.

Conclusion

The article examined the basic functionality of the Rocket.Chat Omnichannel module so that this functionality could be tested. This article is the entry point into the topic of organizing a chat center based on Rocket.Chat. If you have any questions, you can write to us by email rocketchat@fgts.ru The Factor group company is the official distributor of Rocket.Chat in Russia, the CIS countries and neighboring countries, a center of competence and technical support in Russian.

I would also like to invite you to our online webinar about the Rocket.Chat solution, which we are organizing together with a vendor representative in our region on July 10, 2024. Link to register for the webinar

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