Christmas is our peak season, we have to scale up on the number of agents (about 4-6x normal volume) to handle the increase in tickets, but we invariably will have longer handling times.

This Christmas we launched a lot of initiatives to do better than ever. One small but valuable thing we did was to send out a message to all requesters who had waited more than 8 business hours, apologizing and ensuring them that they would be taken care of ASAP.

The motivation

Nobody likes to wait around for answers they need, especially so when it the subject is Christmas presents. We knew some requesters would have to wait longer than they'd like, so we had two goals with this setup:

1. Discourage requesters from sending in duplicate requests about the same thing
2. Comfort the requester and ensure them that they will be taken care of

The solution

An automation (multi-brand setups might require more than one*) that sends out a message when conditions are:

• Status = New
• Ticket: Hours since created (business) is = 8
• Brand = your_brand_of_choice (optional)

Action

• Notifications: Email user = (requester)
• Email subject: Re: {{ticket.title}}
• Email body: your_message*

*) We operate multiple brands in multiple languages, so for the message part I spent some time getting to know some Liquid Markup (alternatively you could setup a new automation for each language, but Liquid Markup is very nice to know).
If you only use one brand and language just input your message in normal text or html and you should be ready to roll.

Using Liquid Markup to send the message in the requesters language

We used case statements to match the message to the requesters language.

To illustrate here is a sample Liquid Markup formatted text where we have two primary languages (Danish and Finnish) and a fallback (English) in case a requester has another language.

{% case ticket.requester.language %}

{% when 'Dansk' %}

<img src="http://link-to-brand-logo-banner.jpg"/>

//DANISH MESSAGE GOES HERE

<br>{{ticket.comments_formatted}}


{% when 'Suomi (Finnish)' %}

<img src="http://link-to-brand-logo-banner.jpg"/>

//FINNISH MESSAGE GOES HERE


<br>{{ticket.comments_formatted}}


{% else %}

<img src="http://link-to-brand-logo-banner.jpg"/>

Hi {{ticket.requester.first_name}},


You submitted a request to us recently.

We are really sorry that we haven't come back to you yet, but we're experiencing a very high volume of requests at the moment.

We just wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten about you and you will hear back from us as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Customer Service

<br>{{ticket.comments_formatted}}

{% endcase %}

The <img src="http://link-to-brand-logo-banner.jpg"/> is just an image banner we use in our email correspondence to signal our brand identity.