When sending communications to employees at scale, several aspects are considered in order to guarantee a good employee experience.

General communication logic

• Milestone Communications
  • The first message of each communication will be sent within an employee’s business hours and in their time zone.
  • Any follow-up messages will be sent to the employee immediately, regardless of if it is outside of business hours, except if the follow-up message is on a time-based delay.
• One-time Communications
  • The first message of each communication will be sent at the exact time specified by the user.
  • Any follow-up messages will be sent to the employee immediately, regardless of if it is outside of business hours, except if the follow-up message is on a time-based delay.
• Timezone Considerations
  • The system will always adjust when messages are actually sent to make sure they are delivered at the appropriate time in each employee's timezone.
    • For example, if you are sending a communication at 8am to employees in both EDT and CDT, then the employees in EDT will be sent the communication an hour before the employees in CDT, since CDT is an hour behind EDT. This way we guarantee that each employee receives the message at 8am in their respective time zones.
  • Most employees inherit the time zone of the location they are assigned to, but it can be adjusted in other ways.

• Email Communication with Only Message Content Experience:
  • When an employee receives an email that includes only a message, they can click the Engage with Olivia button to open the Employee Dashboard and view the message in the widget. When the user navigates away from the Employee Dashboard, then the message will be removed from the widget.
  • The message will not appear as a task in the Employee Dashboard since they have already viewed it from clicking the button in their email.
  • Once the employee responds to a message/media, they should see the message and its conversation history if they decide to click the Engage with Olivia button once more from their email.
  • If the communication is archived before the employee opens the message from their email, then a toast notification will display indicating that this communication was archived.
  • Any further messages sent after an employee responds to the message/media content will not be stored as part of the communication. Instead, a Q&A message will be sent.

Employee responses logic

Employee Q&A detection

Employee Q&A detection will be applied to an account if Employee Q&A is enabled and turned on for the employee AI phone number.

When an employee receives a communication either on the Employee Dashboard or SMS and that communication does not require a response or when the communication is no longer active, Employee Q&A detection will be available. However, when a communication requires a response from the employee, then the system will prioritize the employee’s response to the communication and any Employee Q&A questions will not be detected until after their response is sent.

Using reactions in response

If an employee reacts to a communication message, then the system will not treat the message as a Q&A message. However, the Employee Engagement report will include these reactions to show employee engagement.

Sending media to your AI Assistant

When an employee sends a message back to your AI Assistant and the message only contains a picture, video, gif, document, or link, the system will not categorize this message as Q&A and will not send a follow-up message back to the employee.

Resending undelivered messages

If the system is unable to deliver a communication to the user’s primary channel, the system will attempt to resend the communication to an alternative channel. If a message is undelivered, then on the next cycle of the cron job, the system will send to the employee’s next available channel and update their status in the Audience drawer accordingly.

Default Communication Channel Order:

1. Personal Phone
2. Wok Phone
3. Work Email
4. Personal Email

When sending via SMS, the system relies on a callback method to know if the message is delivered or undelivered. Sometimes this callback function can take a few days to return, and those employees will remain in the Undelivered state the whole time, as the system will only resend the communication once it receives confirmation that the message was undelivered.

Active employee validation

Before sending any communication, the system will check if the employee is still a valid employee and matches the filter(s) set for the communication’s audience. For example, if an employee now works for Location B instead of Location A , then the system will discover this update during its validation and will not send the communication created for Location A employees. This logic automatically takes place just before a communication message is about to send.

Employees also need to be re-evaluated in the event that the first message sent was undelivered. Before the system retries sending the message to an alternate channel, it will revalidate the employee to ensure they still match.

SMS employee validation

The system will follow the resending logic outlined above for SMS, but it has to wait for the Twilio callback first.

• If the callback returns quickly (<1 hour) with a status of Undelivered, then the system will resend the communication without revalidating the employees, as it will assume that if the employee was a valid audience member an hour ago, they likely still are now.
• If the callback returns after 1 hour with a status of Undelivered, then the system will revalidate the employee.

Contact hours (business hours)

In most cases, the system will only send communications during acceptable hours.

First check: Employee preference

The first contact/business hour preferences referenced are those set on each employee’s Push Notification Hours in Alert Management.

Second check: Business hours

If a user has not customized their Push Notification Hours in Alert Management, then the system will pull the company’s business hours stored in the system. If you are unsure of the business hours set for your account, please contact your CS Representative for assistance.

Timezone

When sending a communication to the employee, the sender selects the time and date that they would like employees to receive the communication. The employee will then receive the notification when the set time is reached in their assigned time zone.

• Note: Employees must be imported with a time zone in order for the system to compare their current time with the time that the communication is sent. The system will automatically detect the time zone when importing a user through a data feed by looking at their work_location_id and using the time zone of the corresponding location. However, this can be overwritten by configuring the outcomes in the data feed import settings.

First message

To prevent employees from receiving milestone messages outside of their working hours, the system will check their contact hours/push notification hours and will only send messages from milestone communications within that window.

• Note: The first message from a one-time communication will ignore business hours. These Send Now communications will be sent to all employees in the selected audience immediately after creation. One-time Send Later communications will be sent to all employees in the audience exactly at the scheduled time.

Follow-up messages

If the next message in a communication is set to send immediately, then business hours will be ignored. If the next content is set to be sent on a time-based delay, then the system will use business hours. This applies to both one-time and milestone communications.

Determining contact hours

Contact hours are a combination of a user's push notification hours and the company’s own business hours. The first place we look when setting an employee’s contact hours is the Push Notification Hours set in Alert Management. By default, employees will not have these configured.

If there is any information missing from the candidate’s push notification hours, the system will fill that information in from the company’s business hours.

Examples

For the below examples, assume that:

• The company has its business hours set from 8am-5pm Mon-Fri.
• Alice has her push notification hours set to 8am-5pm Mon-Wed.
• Bob has his push notification hours set to 12pm-5pm Mon-Fri.
• Charlie has not updated his push notification hours, so the system will reference the company’s business hours as his contact hours.
• Alice, Bob, and Charlie all have a start date of 6/1.

Cases:

1. We send a milestone communication to candidates whose start date is 6/1 (which is a Thursday).
   1. Alice gets communication on the following Monday (6/5) at 8am.
   2. Bob gets the notification at 12pm on 6/1.
   3. Charlie gets the notification at 8am on 6/1.
2. We send a scheduled one-time communication using the Send Later button. It is scheduled to send on 6/1 at 8pm.
   1. Alice, Bob, and Charlie get the communication at 8pm on 6/1.
3. We send a one-time communication using the Send Now button on 6/1/23 at 5pm.
   1. Alice, Bob, and Charlie get the communication at 5pm on 6/1.

Opt-out/Opt-in

Right now if a user opts-out of a channel and then later they opt back in to the channel, they will not be sent the communication because the system is not rechecking that they have opted back in.