When sending an Announcement, step 3 of the Announcement creation process covers some advanced settings that you may have some questions about. Fear not, you have arrived at the document that should help explain the questions you may have about these advanced settings. Let us dive in.

When sending an Announcement, a new Conversation is created and added to a Contact’s history within your chosen Department. It is now up to you to choose what to do with this Conversation. The default setting is to leave the new Conversation open so that your Agents can be aware of it and handle it as they please. However, when sending large Announcements, this can crowd out your inbox, so you can also choose to resolve any of these newly created Conversations. When this setting resolves Conversations, you’ll see a “Resolved by Announcement Settings” notice in the Conversation History.

An important note is that this setting only affects Conversations opened as a result of an Announcement. If you send an Announcement to a Contact that already has an open Conversation, then this setting will not affect the status of that Conversation.

The second advanced setting revolves around the Assignment of Conversations. When sending an Announcement you can now assign any associated Conversations to an Agent. This applies to Conversations created by the Announcement AND Conversations that were open when the Announcement was sent. This setting allows Agents to take over and manage the Conversations for the Announcement recipients.

The final setting gives Agents control over replies to Announcements. With SMS messaging, there is no way to know if a message from a Contact is a reply to one message or another. As a result, this setting allows you to consider the first conversation for each Contact in a set timeframe after you sent an Announcement as a reply. This setting is where you define that timeframe. When you define the timeframe, you can start tracking replies and unsubscribes using Announcement Stats. You can read more on those here.

This setting also revolves around assigning a Conversation when a contact replies. If a Contact replies within the set timeframe, an Agent can choose to assign the created Conversation or reassign the existing Conversation to a specific agent.

For the field, please enter whole numbers only. Using decimals will not allow you to send your Announcement (the send button will stay gray).

If you resolve the Conversation that is counted as a "reply", any ensuing Conversations created within the set timeframe are not counted and do not follow the auto-assignment.