Khoros Care Downtime & Impacts to Bot Customers

At times, Khoros will perform scheduled maintenance on your Khoros Care instance. You will receive an email notification for the maintenance approximately 3 days beforehand. This email will contain the date, time, and length of the maintenance. Note your specific date and time from the email

Khoros maintenance windows are designed so that any downtime maintenance we perform is done during times that are least impactful to your Khoros Care teams and your customers. You should plan for up to an hour of downtime where agents won't be able to sign in to your Khoros Care instance. Review the maintenance windows.

For most of our customers, this impact is minimal and potentially completely invisible to your customers. 

For a very small group of our bot customers, the downtime could translate to an impact to bot interactions if your bot is connected to the Care API to retrieve messages vs. network APIs directly. The former may mean that your customers won't receive messages from your bot during the downtime and won't receive messages afterward unless they re-engage again subsequently. This can also have an impact on the continuation of bot flows that started before the downtime that got interrupted. Those customers may experience a restart of their conversation journey with the bot, such as a bot response that ignores the context the customer already provided.

To minimize the disruption now, consider one of these options: 

• Welcome Response message
• Bot Holding Work Queue

Welcome Response message

Set a Welcome Response message in Care for the affected bot channels 1 hour before the downtime, informing customers they might experience a disrupted bot journey. This will trigger a Welcome Response as well as starting the bot journey. Don’t forget to disable this new Welcome Response after the downtime.

Alternatively, you could update the welcome bot flow directly within Flow, and then remove it after the downtime.

Here’s a sample message:

"As we make security improvements to our servers, the bot may be impacted over the next couple of hours. If the bot fails to respond to you, please simply re-engage with us after 1 hour to continue the conversation. We apologize for the impact this may have."

Bot Holding Work Queue

If customers don't re-engage the bot after the downtime, you might have to take conversations out of your bot holding queue and deliver them to agents without waiting for automatic agent handoff by the bot. Follow this guide to achieve this. 

Note: If you use bots other than Khoros Flow, confirm with your bot provider how a downtime of Khoros Care might affect you. The steps above should also be of value to you.

If you have any concerns or questions regarding this, raise them with your Account team. If you don't know who they are, simply ask Maia, our chatbot, on Atlas 'CSM' and they will let you know who you can speak to. Also, don't forget that our Support Team works 24/7/365 in urgent cases.