As you start to communicate with your Customers through DriveCentric via Emails, Texts, and Videos, you will start receiving responses from your customers. When you receive these response messages from your customers, the messages will show on the DriveCentric Sidebar.
Responding to your customers promptly can have a major impact on customer engagement. You will notice a running timer next to each customer awaiting a response. This timer will continue to run until a response has been sent to the customer message and will impact response time reporting metrics in your DriveCentric reports.
You can take the following steps to either respond and answer to the customer message or mark it as "Ignored" in DriveCentric, which essentially marks the response as "Read" and will remove the message from your un-replied sidebar.
Responding to your Customer Message removes it from your Un-replied Sidebar
Your Un-replied sidebar will display all incoming text messages, emails, and chat messages from your customers who are awaiting a response.
If you respond to your customer message that is waiting on your un-replied sidebar, it will clear the message from the sidebar acknowledging you responded to your customer.
For example: If you receive a text message from your customer, and you reply to their message with a text message, the message showing on the un-replied sidebar will now be removed as you have responded to the customer message.
If you open your Un-replied sidebar and click on the desired message you would like to respond to, it will open the Customer Card and allow you to respond to the customer either from the Activity Timeline or from the Conversations page in the Customer Card.
Ignoring your Customer Messages removes it from your Un-replied Sidebar
Your Un-replied sidebar will display all incoming text messages, emails, and chat messages from your customers who are awaiting a response.
If you have a customer message that is waiting on your un-replied sidebar and you click the "Ignore" icon, it will clear the message from the sidebar acknowledging that someone at the dealership with sufficient access clicked the "Ignore" icon, and therefore removed the message from the Un-replied sidebar.
NOTE: An ignore option will appear when hover your cursor over an un-replied message. The best practice is to always have the last response when communicating to a customer as this can also impact response time reporting metrics.
Once you click the "Ignore" icon on a customer message, the message will remove itself from the sidebar, but will still be visible for you to find. First, you will need to open the "Conversations" screen (the icon looks like two chat bubbles on top of each other). Then, click on the icon of the circle with a line through it to locate those messages that someone at the dealership marked as "Ignored".
Answering Un-replied Customer Messages from the Conversations Screen
You can answer customer messages from the Un-replied sidebar by opening the full Conversations Screen in DriveCentric, found under the Main Menu (icon looks like two chat bubbles stacked).
In the Conversations Screen, you have your inbox on the lefthand side. Find the Unreplied inbox. When you respond to messages in the full Conversations Screen, they’ll be removed from the Un-replied sidebar automatically.
