⏳ Thinking Time

Thinking Time, formerly known as Smart Delay, is a feature designed to enhance customer experience by providing more relevant and contextual responses. Instead of responding to each customer message individually, which can often feel robotic, Thinking Time waits for a specific period before replying. During this period, incoming messages are batched together, and a single, comprehensive response is sent. This approach allows Siena to respond appropriately to a series of messages that modify or add to the initial customer intent. 

How Does Thinking Time Work?

Here's a simple breakdown of how the Thinking Time feature operates:

1. Suppose Thinking Time is set for a 5-minute delay.
2. When a user sends a message, a 5-minute countdown begins.
3. Crucially, the timer resets with each new message from the user. For instance, if a user sends a message at 1:00pm, the response is scheduled for 1:05pm. However, if the user sends another message at 1:03pm, the response is delayed until 1:08pm. This pattern continues as long as the user keeps sending messages. The response is only sent once 5 minutes have passed since the last interaction.
4. To prevent agent interference, tickets awaiting response are tagged with siena-smart-delay-awaiting.
5. If Thinking Time is not enabled, messages are processed right away the moment it's sent to us.
6. By default, Thinking Time is disabled. Merchants must manually enable it.

How to set up Thinking Time

Please note that this feature is currently in beta and will only be available to customers who specifically request it. 

To configure Thinking Time, go to Settings -> AI Configuration then scroll down to the bottom.

Best Practices

For optimal results, we recommend setting the delay time to more than 1 minute. This is because processing a message from Siena can take anywhere from 20 seconds to 1 minute. A delay of more than 1 minute will yield more consistent results especially for non-chat channels and it gives more of a "human" touch to Siena's responses. For chat channels, you can set it to 15-30 secs.

Limitations

Please be aware of the following limitations:

- Thinking Time can batch a maximum of 5 messages at a time. We only batch conversations in the same email or chat thread.
- Currently, Thinking Time only supports three help desks: Kustomer, Gorgias, and Zendesk.
- If one or more messages in a batch are to be skipped, Siena will not respond to the batch.

If you have any further questions or need assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Customer Support team. We're here to help!