Inbox: Automatically route records to your operators

Identifying inefficiencies in workflows and processes, implementing improvements, and finally team management - sounds like a day of an Operations Leader. And a very common inefficiency to deal with at first place is related to distributing records to be managed by the operators.

Imagine a situation where a customer support team needs to answer a long list of tickets without clear dispatch rules. What typically happens is that operators tend to choose the easiest tickets, and complex tasks wait to be solved. To avoid that, managers manually assign tasks to the team, often every day in the morning. Sounds pretty inefficient, doesn't it?

Plus, without clear assignment rules, you might find multiple people working on the same case, causing confusion and wasted effort. Not to mention that some industries like finance or insurance must comply with strict data privacy and security regulations - and that means that operators need to have limited access to user data. Finally, whenever there is a need to escalate a ticket to another team, the same issues repeat there.

So far, achieving that required a lot of manual work. For example, managers could assign records based on the last 4 digits of a tax number or another characteristic. Forest Admin users also used to create custom actions that made it possible to assign a task to a specific person. But what if there is a way to do it automatically, saving tons of time?

Say hello to automated record distribution with our new Inbox feature 🎉

In short, Inbox at Forest Admin lets you define how to automatically route records to your operators for better efficiency and productivity, eliminating the guesswork of what to choose. Inbox is seamlessly integrated with your admin panel, user data, and privacy settings, and it gives you a customisable dispatch rules (from the newest to the oldest, from the oldest to the newest or random) in order to display only the relevant records to operators and make sure that only one person is assigned to the record.

Let's have a look on how it works 👇

If the Inbox feature has been enabled to you, you can access it from the Collaboration tab, assuming you have Admin, Developer, or Editor rights.

All you need to do to create an Inbox (or inboxes, you are not limited to one) is to choose the right data (collections and segments) and the dispatch rule:

LIFO, the newest element will be shown first;
FIFO, the oldest element will be shown first;
Random, a random element will be shown first.

Inbox is based on Segments, which means you may need to configure them before defining the dispatch routes. For example, if your use case is to onboard new companies, you may need to create Segments for companies to onboard, onboarded, and rejected. Read how.

The first step to create an Inbox is to choose the collection and segment it will be based on. In our example, it is the collection of transactions to validate.

The next step is to choose the dispatch rule. The next step is to verify the setup before creating an Inbox.

Here is the Inbox view with an open ticket. If the Summary views are not set up, you will be redirected to the Details view. However, we recommend you to use Summary views with action buttons.

As you can see, only a few simple steps are needed to activate an Inbox. It takes less then a minute!

Key takeaways:

Inbox at Forest Admin lets you define how to route records to your operators for better efficiency and productivity. It removes the guesswork in record attribution, cherry-picking, and duplicating work. In addition, it makes escalating workflows easier.
Inbox integrates seamlessly with other collaboration features on Forest Admin, like approval workflows, notes, and activity logs.
Accessing data in the Inbox is based on the global Roles and Permissions settings, so you can meet even the strictest data privacy regulations.
Once the operator handles a record, it is assigned to them and it leaves the initial Segment, avoiding the risk of duplicating work.
A manager view is coming soon.
Right now, Inbox is available by request to users on the Pro plan. Contact us if you'd like to have it enabled on your project.

Do you need an admin panel with the strongest collaboration features on the market? Try Forest Admin for free.