This Khoros Care update does not require any downtime. This release will be deployed with no expected impact to your operations until you configure the new features. If you do not yet see the new features, they will be deployed to your system later in the week.

Feature Updates

• Allow moderation actions when approval is required
• Typing indicators in Assigned To Me and Pending queues
• Modern Chat - Country Allow list 
• Brand Messenger: Clear conversations for unauthenticated and authenticated end users
• Coming Soon: External Responses

Allow moderation actions when approval is required

Normally, when an Agent is under Approval requirements, they cannot take moderation actions (hide or delete, for example) on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Khoros Communities, and Khoros Modern Chat and Brand Messenger (iOS /Android in-app messaging).

This design was based on early customer feedback that brands who wanted agents under approvals for responses also didn’t want these agents to take any actions on the target network. Approvals were primarily used for onboarding new agents.

Over time, we have seen more brands use Approvals for responses in the context of regulatory requirements and broad governance and not just as a new-agent or moderator guardrail. 

In this scenario, most brands require approvals for responses but not for moderation actions. As such, the current workflow led to a bottleneck of moderation actions.

To remove this bottleneck, we have added a new, team-level “Allow Moderation” setting as part of “Approval Settings” in the Admin console so that you can enable  agents to perform moderation actions even if their responses require approval. 

The Allow Moderation setting is “Off” by default to provide the same behavior prior to this feature.

Agents who require approval and have this setting “On”  can perform all available moderation actions. Currently, these moderation actions include:

• Like/Unlike
• Hide/Unhide
• Delete
• Mark as Accepted Solution/Revoke Accepted Solution
• Add Kudo/Remove Kudo
• Move, Edit, Retweet

Typing indicators in Assigned To Me and Pending queues

Customer typing indicators are present in the Conversation pane, showing agents that a customer is typing a response on a supported channel (Apple Business Chat, Khoros Modern Chat, and Khoros Brand Messenger (iOS and Android in-app messaging). 

Prior to this release, the typing indicator was shown only in the conversation panel below the latest message in the conversation.

We now also display this typing indicator in the Assigned to Me and Pending queues on top of the user avatar. This enables agents working on multiple conversations to quickly see conversations where the author is actively responding to the brand.

Modern Chat - Country Allow list

Brands have had the ability to control the visibility of the Modern Chat widget to users based upon IP address. This is extremely useful for testing during initial  configuration and rollout as well as for the subsequent roll-out of new rule conditions because it enables you to verify new rules in production before those rules go live to the public. (You accomplish this by having a rule condition that restricts the rule to only your internal network.)

Several customers have also wanted to use this functionality to create rules by Country, but this is not as straight-forward to configure.

To meet this need, we have added the ability to show Modern Chat to a user based upon the Country the user appears to be. For maximum flexibility in your deployments, you can set this at the global widget level as well as at the individual rules within the widget.

Brand Messenger: Clear conversations for unauthenticated and authenticated end users

Brands have had the ability to optionally clear the end-users’ view of Modern Chat or Brand Messenger (iOS and Android in-app messaging) conversations after the conversation has been closed by an agent after a certain period of time. This is particularly useful for brands who never want to show an end-user history of their previous closed conversations.

Some Brands have requested more granularity to clear or not clear this history based on whether the conversation is with an Authenticated or Unauthenticated author (and in particular to clear the conversation history only for unauthenticated users). 

To meet this need and provide maximum configuration flexibility, we have now split this setting into two discrete settings under Brand Messenger > General Settings. 

These two settings default to the previous setting to maintain the current behavior.

Coming Soon: External Responses

We are putting the final touches on a new “External Responses” feature. While not yet released, we expect to release this feature the week of September 21.  

Although no workflows will change this new addition, we want to give you a heads-up in case anyone in your company responds to customers natively (or through another tool). Agents will start seeing these externally sent responses in Khoros Care. Previously, agents had no insight from Khoros Care that the customer had already received a response. External Responses will be supported for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram initially.

Note: We are adding these new tags as part of our Care and Marketing integration to identify brand responses that were sent from Agent View, Manage View, or from outside of Care (External). These tags will be applied to appropriate responses and will be visible on the conversations where applied, as well as available for any type of workflow (routing, prioritization) where tags can be used.

The external responses will appear in the conversation view with a visual indicator and include an “External Response” tag, enabling you to create business rules / filters / dashboards based on it.

For brands that do have users who send responses natively or with other tools that will now show up in Khoros Care, we are expecting minimal impact to analytics:

• External responses will have no impact on calculation of response time (TAR, the customers wait time).
• Conversations with External Responses that do not have Agent Responses will still show up in the Conversations Awaiting Response widget.
• For handle-time calculations, received external responses will count as a “terminating event”. For example, if an agent is in the process of writing a response and an external response is received, and the agent subsequently closes the conversation (because they no longer need to respond), the agent will end up with Response Assist HT and Close-wrap HT that most closely represents how the agent spent this time.
• External Responses are not expected to remove a conversation from “Conversations Awaiting Response” and are expected to leave a conversation as “unengaged”.