Sparkcentral Agent Quick Start Guide

As an agent, you can use Sparkcentral to manage your work flow and manage handle conversations from one location.

Log in to Sparkcentral

To access your Sparkcentral account, open your Chrome browser and log in.

When you first log in, you can set your availability as Available or Away. When you’re available, you’ll be given the first conversation waiting in the New queue. Not ready to start handling the queue? Change your status to Away (you may have other choices, depending on your organization’s settings).

To change your default availability preference, follow these steps:

1. Under Inbox Settings, select Personal Preferences.
2. On the General tab, under Default availability, select a status, and then select Save.

The next time you log in, this will be your default status.

Asynchronous work flow

In Sparkcentral, you engage with all your contacts from one streamlined queue that consists of conversations in different states. There’s no need for you and a contact to constantly be engaged in a conversation—instead, conversations happen asynchronously.

Each conversation workflow consists of three states, which correspond with the three queues:

• New - The conversation is either new or has a new reply from the contact and needs follow-up.
• Pending - The conversation is waiting for the contact to follow up.
• Resolved - The conversation has ended and requires no further action.

The New queue is the only queue that needs your consistent attention. Here’s why:

Conversations from all channels you have access to appear in the New queue.

Conversations that were previously in the Pending queue automatically move back to the New queue when a contact gets back to you.

Service-level agreements (SLAs)

A service-level agreement, or SLA, is an agreed-upon measure of the response times of your team. When a conversation isn’t answered by the time specified in your SLA, it’s considered “breached.” The queue displays colored icons​​ to warn you of upcoming breaches. Gray and orange icons show the time left before the SLA is breached, and red icon shows how long a breached conversation is overdue.

Reply box

The Reply box is where conversations take place.

The active channel identifier highlights the account you’re using to reply.

Assign conversations

If you want to assign a conversation to another agent, you can search or scroll for their name. The assigned agent receives a notification that a message has been assigned to them.

Change message status

• Pending – Select Pending when you're waiting for more information from a contact or if you need to do additional work. The conversation moves to the Pending queue.
  
• Resolved – Select Resolve when the contact’s issue is resolved or their questions are answered. The conversation moves to the Resolved queue.
  

Conversation view

The conversation view is the main area of Sparkcentral where most of your work takes place, and where all conversation history is viewed and recorded. When a message comes in, a conversation is started.

The header at the top of every conversation includes labels for topics, contact groups, the state of the conversation, and the channel name. You can add a topic manually or set automated topics.

Each message within a conversation includes the type of message (private message, Facebook post, Twitter direct message, etc.), a link to the social network for public messages, the message sender, and a timestamp.

Message metadata

Metadata for each message displays a timestamp, the message sender, the type of message (private message, Facebook post, Twitter direct message, etc.), and a link to the social network for public messages.

Contextual action menu

Select an inbound message to reveal the contextual action menu:

• Reply to message
• Quote tweet
• Like public message
• Block a thread – blocks further replies to a tweet or Facebook post from coming in to the platform
• Mask message – deletes contents of message from Sparkcentral and our databases

Audit trails

Audit trails show the actions performed on a conversation, who performed the action, and when the action was performed.

You can show or hide audit trails by using the check box at the top of the conversation view. Select Conversation view, and then select or clear the Audit trails check box.

Conversation notes

You can add internal notes to messages in a conversation by selecting Add note. Notes are highlighted and include your name and a timestamp. You can edit or delete them at any time.

Copy a full conversation

To copy an entire conversation to your clipboard to use elsewhere, select Copy in the header of the conversation. A new window shows the text that will be copied to your clipboard. Select Copy to confirm.

All inbound and outbound messages for that conversation are included. Attachments (like files and images) aren’t copied, but a note indicates that an attachment was part of the conversation.

Use contact attributes

You'll find your contact and their attributes to the right of the conversation view. These attributes include contextual details about a contact, like an email address, first and last name, account ID, and more. Agents or system automations can populate these attributes automatically. You can read, enter, and store information on this tab during or after conversations to help you:

• Understand who you’re talking to
• Easily spot VIPs
• Update relevant customer information
  

Use saved replies

Save time replying to contacts by using pre-written responses. Select Add saved reply in the reply box and choose responses from your team’s collections or create your own personal collection of responses. When you select a saved reply from a collection, it appears in the reply box, ready for you to send or make edits as needed.