No reply needed and silent conversations

In short: For every customer message, aishaa assesses whether your team still needs to reply to it. You decide what happens with a “no reply needed” judgement using a ladder of three settings per channel: Show only, Take out of the workload or Set status automatically. In addition, aishaa looks every night at conversations that have been silent for a number of days and assesses whether anything is still outstanding. You set that number of days with Silent conversation after (days).

Where to find this

The settings are in the Way of working section:

• For the whole account: Account > Account settings, section Way of working. Here an Account admin sets the fields Silent conversation after (days), No reply needed (e-mail) and No reply needed (WhatsApp) and saves them with Save below the section.
• For a single organisation that differs from the account: Organisation > General, section Way of working, after switching on Use an own way of working for (organisation). This section only exists in an account with more than one organisation. See Way of working: webshop or service provider.
• Via Tell aishaa (on the Organisation > Intelligence > Changes page or in the chat): type for example “Set no reply needed for email to take out of the workload” or “Assess silent conversations after 10 days”. aishaa always turns this into a proposal that an Organisation admin approves. See Tell aishaa.

Who: an Account admin for the account settings, an Organisation admin for an organisation’s own way of working and for approving proposals. A Team lead can propose the change via Tell aishaa. The settings apply per organisation: each organisation follows the account unless it has its own way of working.

The Way of working section in Account settings with the Silent conversation after (days) field and the two drop-down lists No reply needed (e-mail) and No reply needed (WhatsApp) with the options Show only, Take out of the workload and Set status automatically.

When aishaa judges that no reply is needed

aishaa assesses the need for a reply at three moments:

1. When a customer message comes in. While processing the message, aishaa checks in several stages (mail headers, understanding and composer) whether the message calls for a reply. A thank-you, an automatic notification, a conversation that is already running through another channel or an unwanted message gets the judgement “no reply needed” with a reason.
2. After silence. Every night aishaa assesses open conversations where the customer wrote last and where nothing has happened for longer than the set number of days. The stage is then called Silence.
3. When a colleague asks for it. If you click Run analysis again or Handle anyway in a ticket, the agent looks at the message again and writes a proposal if a reply is needed.

The judgement consists of a decision (reply needed, not needed or unclear), a reason and a confidence percentage. Only a “not needed” judgement with a sufficiently high confidence leads to an action on the ticket; a doubtful judgement is at most shown. Which reasons aishaa can give and how the judgement is visible on the ticket is explained in No reply needed.

The three settings of the ladder

The fields No reply needed (e-mail) and No reply needed (WhatsApp) determine separately per channel what aishaa does with a “no reply needed” judgement. Phone tickets and other channels follow the email setting. The help text in the app reads: What aishaa does when a customer message needs no reply. Start with showing; move up once you trust it.

It is a ladder: each setting does everything the previous one does, plus something extra.

What stays the same in every setting:

• With “no reply needed”, nothing goes to the customer. It only means that no proposal is created and, depending on the setting, that the ticket leaves the workload or is set to Answered.
• A colleague can always confirm the judgement with Correct, nothing needed or overrule it with Handle anyway. With Handle anyway the ticket returns to the workload and the agent writes a proposal after all.
• If the customer sends a new message, the ticket becomes Open again, returns to the workload and aishaa assesses the new message again.
• Only tickets with the status Open or Answered are changed. aishaa leaves a snoozed ticket, a ticket waiting for an external reply and a closed ticket alone.

A delivery always stays in the workload when it comes in

If a customer sends something you asked for (documents, details, a signed form) without a new question, aishaa gives the reason Delivery. A delivery is work for your team: when it comes in, such a ticket stays in the workload in every setting, including Take out of the workload and Set status automatically. You then only see the chip and the message. Only after the silence window may aishaa assume that the delivery has been dealt with outside the conversation (see below).

The silence window: Silent conversation after (days)

When messages come in, aishaa can only assess messages that actually arrive. A conversation in which nothing happens any more would otherwise stay open forever. That is why aishaa looks at silent conversations every night.

A conversation qualifies if it meets all of these conditions:

• The ticket has the status Open and has not already been taken out of the workload.
• The customer wrote last; no reply from a colleague has been sent since.
• The last customer message is at least the set number of days old (Silent conversation after (days)).
• aishaa has not previously established that this conversation still needs a reply. A conversation with an unanswered question simply stays in the workload, however long it has been silent.
• The conversation has not been assessed after silence before. A new silence assessment can only follow once the customer writes again.

aishaa then reads the whole conversation (the last 40 messages) and assesses whether you still owe the customer anything. The result:

• Something is still outstanding: the judgement becomes “reply needed” and the ticket simply stays in the workload. An AI note appears in the composer with a short summary of what is still outstanding.
• Nothing is owed any more: the judgement becomes “no reply needed” with one of the familiar reasons (Closing remark, Notification, Handled elsewhere, Unwanted) or, for a delivery, the reason Delivery after silence. The judgement goes through the same ladder as when a message comes in: show only, take out of the workload or set to Answered. The AI note explains why nothing is outstanding any more.
• Unclear: aishaa cannot determine whether anything is still outstanding. The ticket stays in the workload unchanged.

You can recognise a silence assessment by the Silence stage in the tooltip of the No reply needed chip (No reply needed according to the Silence (… % sure)) and in the Timeline tab.

An open ticket with the No reply needed chip, the tooltip No reply needed according to the Silence with the percentage, and in the composer the AI note with aishaa’s summary.

Setting the number of days

Choose a window that suits your lead times. If you process deliveries within a week, 7 days is plenty; with longer processes, a larger window prevents aishaa from treating a conversation as finished while you are still working on it.

Choosing a setting

1. Start with Show only. You then see in the ticket overview which tickets aishaa judges as “no reply needed” and can indicate with Correct, nothing needed or Handle anyway whether that is right.
2. After a few weeks, look at the No reply needed report under Reports. There you see per reason how often a colleague confirmed the judgement and how often a reply was sent anyway. See Report: no reply needed.
3. If the judgement is almost always right, move the setting one step up. Take out of the workload keeps the status Open, so you still see the tickets; Set status automatically tidies them up to Answered.

If you change the setting, aishaa also applies the new setting in the background to tickets that already have a “no reply needed” judgement and are still Open or Answered. If you move the setting from Show only to Take out of the workload, those tickets are removed from the workload after all. If you move the setting down, tickets that are still Open return to the workload; tickets that are already Answered keep that status.

Good to know

• The three settings apply to the whole organisation per channel. There is no exception per customer or per sender.
• The silence assessment runs at night. A conversation that reaches the threshold today therefore only gets a judgement the next morning. Per organisation, aishaa assesses at most 200 conversations per night, oldest first; a large backlog is worked through over several nights.
• In the No reply needed report you see under Silence window (days) how many conversations are currently silent and waiting to be assessed (Silent, awaiting judgement) and how many are being processed (Judgement under way).
• Set status automatically never closes a ticket itself. aishaa sets Answered at most; a ticket only becomes Closed through automatic closing or by a colleague.
• If you want a proposal for a specific conversation after all, click Handle anyway. The judgement for that ticket is then cleared and the ticket returns to the workload.
• If AI analyses are switched off for your organisation, aishaa does not assess the need for a reply or silent conversations either.

Related

• No reply needed
• Way of working: webshop or service provider
• Account settings
• Tell aishaa
• Report: no reply needed
• Ticket statuses and lifecycle
• Internal notes and AI notes
• How aishaa processes a ticket