Limit new e-mail conversations

Description

Having too many active conversations causes performance issues which will prevent Agents from handling any conversations. A new setting has been added to dampen the amount of new e-mails that the E-mail Dialogue Provider reads while still allowing replies of customers on active e-mail conversations to be processed.

• Audio conversations are completely ignored by this setting.

• It has no impact on other providers (i.e. WebChat, WhatsApp, Generic, SMS).

• Sending replies by the agent will always occur.

• The number of items (conversations) in queue is determined at the start of the poll and is not changed while reading e-mails:

  • Also includes conversations from UCCs that are offline, because they might be brought back online at some time.

  • Also includes conversations from UCCs which are online and whose sessions have not yet been restored by the Dialogue Manager, see Limit restore of queue.

• Messages that have [A365- (where A365 is the ReferencePrefix setting) will be read first up to the PageSize setting (default 10);

  Note

  Message with the ReferencePrefix are replies by the customer on existing email sessions.

  • This is done regardless of the setting.

• Only if the PageSize has not been hit yet and the number of TextHandling items in queue is below the value of the ItemsInQueueThreshold setting will new e-mails be read;

  • The PageSize setting is still honored which means it will not read more than that number;

  • Example: 5 e-mails have already been read that have the ReferencePrefix in the subject. The threshold has not been hit at the start of the poll. 5 new e-mails should now be read.

• Changing the value of the setting allows you to prioritize mailboxes by giving particular mailboxes a higher value and/or other mailboxes a lower value.

How to enable

The plugin setting ItemsInQueueThreshold has been added with EmailDialogueProvider scope. The default value is 950*.

SQL

The following query is used on the DialogueManager database by the E-mail Dialogue Provider to determine the number of active conversations:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Conversation WHERE HandlingStatusId <= 1

Business Case

In the scenario that you have an priority mailbox that needs to be handled regardless of the limit, the following setup will be recommended:

• Email Dialogue Provider connecting to the priority mailbox: ItemsInQueueThreshold = 950

• Email Dialogue Provider connecting to other mailbox: ItemsInQueueThreshold = 750

Using this configuration the priority mailbox can always handle 200 more new e-mail session.