Email Forwarding & Escalations

Overview

Email Forwarding & Escalations allow platform users and even non-users to receive email notifications triggered by incoming messages from contacts. There are three main reasons why we might escalate questions to your staff:

1. The information needed to answer is not something we can find.
   At Mainstay, we never want to guess when providing an answer to a contact. If a contact asks a question for which your organization has no answer in the Knowledge Base, it can be escalated to a staff member. In many instances, this can be a learning opportunity for the bot. (See Knowledge Maintenance.)
2. The contact has a need that deserves personal attention.
   Contacts often develop a personal connection with our chatbots, and this means that sometimes they share a lot. If a user is struggling with a situation of personal nature or is giving a lot of information about a specific situation, it may be best to escalate the message to a staff member so that student can discuss the challenges they're facing. Sometimes a student is just asking for human help!
3. Sensitive situations.
   It's rare that a contact would send a message of a sensitive nature or requiring immediate intervention. These could include messages about an emergency or a threat to harm themselves or others. In order to respond quickly in these situations, we recommend Automatic Escalations.

Email

The email recipient(s) will receive a message from noreply@mainstay.com with relevant information about the escalation event. The first section will depend on the situation:

• The email was manually forwarded from the Conversations page:
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• The email was automatically escalated because the AI matched to a particular topic or sensitive keyword:
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• The email was escalated from a script action on a simple message, notifying you that the contact received a particular nudge:
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• The email was escalated from a script action on an interactive message, notifying you of the contact's response to a particular question:
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The email will also include information about the contact record, including their name, phone, email, IDs, and any custom fields that are configured to be included in escalation emails.

Finally, the email will include recent message history, and a link to the full Conversation in the Mainstay platform:

Note: If the escalation rule is configured to send to multiple recipients, all of these recipients will be visible in the email's "To:" field.

Settings Page

To configure these settings, click the gear icon in the side bar and then select "Email Forwarding & Escalations", or visit https://app.mainstay.com/settings/escalation.

Trusted Email Domains

To prevent spam and unauthorized users, enter one or more trusted email domains. When adding email recipients (below), their email address will be validated against these domains. Additionally, responses to Escalations Emails will only be accepted if the sender matches one of these domains.

• To add a domain, type it into the box and click Add.
• To remove an existing domain, click the Remove button next to it.
• Note that it is not possible to remove the mainstay.com domain.

If your email server filters incoming messages, make sure to add sender noreply@mainstay.com and IP address 192.254.116.209 to your allowlist.

Allowed Emails

In this section, you can configure which email addresses are available for both Manual Forwarding and Automatic Escalations.

To add an email recipient, click Add Email. This opens an overlay modal:

• Name is for displaying this recipient in lists and rules.
• Email is the actual email address that messages will be sent to.
• Show in lists? is used to determine if an email recipient is included in the Conversations page when manually forwarding a contact's message.
• Reason is shown when manually forwarding a contact's message. This is because the platform user who is manually forwarding a message may not know the exact name or email address of the intended recipient. For example, if the incoming message is about technical issues, the user may not know to forward it to James specifically, so this Reason can help identify the right recipient.
• Click Save to add this email recipient to the list.
• To edit this information for an existing Allowed Email, click the pencil icon.
• To delete an existing Allowed Email, click the trashcan icon.

Email Forward Suggestions

Platform users on the Conversations page can select any incoming message and manually escalate it to an email recipient. (See Manually Forward a Message in Conversations.) This is useful when the contact has a specific question or situation that requires a subject matter expert, who may not even be a Mainstay platform user.

To add a new rule, click Add Rule. This opens an overlay modal:

• Audience allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts who meet certain criteria. (See Creating Audiences for more information.)
• Email lets you select the actual email address(es) that messages will be sent to.
• Escalation rule name is shown when manually forwarding a contact's message. If a contact meets the Audience criteria and Geo-matching Conditions, this recipient will be the top suggestion shown.
• Click Save to add this rule to the list.

• To edit an existing rule, click the edit pencil icon in that row.
• To delete an existing rule, click the trashcan icon in that row.
• A contact may meet the criteria for more than one Email Forwarding rule. To change the priority that determines which rule is suggested, click the up and down arrows.
• Note that the final rule, "If nothing else matches", is required. If the contact does not match the criteria from any of the preceding rules, this email recipient will be suggested instead.

Automatic Email Escalation

Incoming messages (outside of campaigns/scripts and Live Chat) are automatically interpreted by the AI and associated with a particular Knowledge Base understanding. If no understanding is a close enough match, a Fallback Response is sent instead.

This same identification can be used to automatically escalate messages to email recipients when the incoming message matches a particular understanding or Fallback.

To add a new rule, click Add Rule. This opens an overlay modal:

• Understanding allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to incoming messages that match to particular understandings. These understandings can be content created by your organization or built-in by default; they can even be sensitive words, such as a contact saying "die" within any message. They can even be Fallbacks. (See below.)
• Audience allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts who meet certain criteria. (See Creating Audiences for more information.)
• Email allows you to select one or more recipients for the actual escalation email.
  • To select more than one recipient, check multiple emails from the list. You can remove individual recipients by clicking the "X" next to their email address.
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• Escalation rule name is shown in this list.
• Click Save to add this rule to the list.

• To edit an existing rule, click the edit pencil icon in that row.
• To delete an existing rule, click the trashcan icon in that row.
• A contact may meet the criteria for more than one Automatic Escalation rule. To change the priority that determines which rule is triggered (and thus which recipient the message is sent to), click the up and down arrows.

Escalating Fallback Responses

In addition to regular Knowledge Base understandings, it is also possible to trigger Automatic Escalations on Fallback responses (formerly "IDK" or "I don't know" responses). These can be searched like any other understanding, and may appear as PSEUDO_TOPIC.

Conversations Page

Email escalation events will appear on the Conversations page, indicating all recipients of the escalation email:

Helpful Tips

• Escalation emails can be forwarded to other staff members, who can reply directly to a contact, as long as their email address is within an allowed domain.
• If you want to escalate to an entire group, we recommend using Google Groups or an equivalent "listserv" email address. Mainstay will send the escalation email to that group (for example, support@college.edu), and all members of that group will receive a copy of the email and be able to respond. However, Mainstay will not be able to inform other members of the group when one member has responded to an escalation.
• Give your Forwarding Suggestion and Automatic Escalation rules descriptive names so that you can easily tell which situations they are for.
• One Automatic Escalations rule can contain multiple understandings / topics.
• Use the box-and-arrow links to view Audiences and understandings to verify your selections.
• Remember, when an understanding is included in an Automatic Escalation rule, the email recipient will receive a notification every time the AI matches to this understanding (for contacts who meet the filtering criteria).
• Once the contact receives a response from an escalation, they will be given the opportunity to reply. If they do, it will trigger another escalation to the same recipient. Otherwise, the contact will resume their conversation with the bot.
• See Recommendations for more.
• Scripts (which can be used in Campaigns, #Commands, Web-chat Intro, and more) can also trigger email notifications. See Script Actions for more information.