About email conversation flows for advanced AI agents

If you've connected an advanced AI agent to email, the AI agent can have multiple interactions with the customer over email, offering greater automation potential. For example, if a customer emails a request but leaves out key details, such as order ID, the AI agent can request the missing information before going any further.

Email conversation flows notify the AI agent when there is a new customer reply, and recognize when a human agent is needed. Using these data points, you can track reopen rates and measure automation performance for the AI agent.

This article covers the following topics:

Understanding email conversation flows

Limitations for email conversation flows

Understanding email conversation flows

You use the dialogue builder to create conversation flows for an email AI agent, similar to creating conversation flows for a messaging AI agent. However, the available block types differ between the two types of AI agents. For details, see Available block types.

Additionally, email conversation flows support automating the first triggered use case in every conversation. When the dialogue of the triggered use case is complete, and the ticket won't receive any more responses from the AI agent, the tag escalated_by_ultimate is added to the ticket to indicate that the automation is complete.

The escalated_by_ultimate tag is automatically applied in the following scenarios:

Actions without a reply

Single-reply dialogues

Link to

Multiple-reply dialogues

Escalation block

Whenever this tag is added, the AI agent does not provide any more responses. This includes instances where a human agent manually adds the tag before the automation is complete.

Applying actions without sending a reply

Simply add actions in a reply and leave the text reply block empty. This way your email AI agent will apply actions without sending anything to your customer.

Using single-reply dialogues

Single-reply dialogues with conversation flows work the same way as without conversation flows. If nothing follows a ticket reply block in the dialogue builder, the automation is considered complete.

Using link to

While email conversation flows are limited to one use case per conversation, linking allows you to continue the conversation in another dialogue, so the link to block is not considered the end of the conversation. Even though it's the final block in the dialogue, you can link to other single- or multi-reply dialogues.

Using multiple-reply dialogues

Multiple-reply dialogues can use the additional block options available for email conversation flows, including customer messages, link to blocks, and multiple ticket replies.

These dialogues allow the AI agent to send follow-up questions to confirm the customer's intention or request missing information. Additional messages from the customer can be processed and used during the automation.

The number of blocks is not limited, but it's a good idea to use no more than three messages to gather the required information to automate a case.

There following events are supported for advanced AI agents for email, and can be triggered in multiple-reply scenarios:

Ticket received by AI agents - Advanced: This event is triggered only once per conversation, when the first customer message is received.

Ticket processed by AI agents - Advanced: This event and the related actions are triggered with each ticket reply.

Ticket reply delay events: The delay events are triggered for each reply. When using delays with email conversation flows, don't set long reply delays, but consider reply delays of 10-30 minutes.

Using an escalation block

When an email conversation needs to be escalated to a human agent, you can use an escalation block. This block adds the escalation tag to the ticket, can trigger additional actions, and sends the ticket to a human agent to take over.

For more information, see Configuring escalation strategies and flows for advanced AI agents.

Limitations for email conversation flows

Email conversation flows have the following limitations:

No rule-based escalations

No AI agent replies to tickets older than three days