Rapport - Managing Replies, Escalated Replies and Incoming Messages

As well as replies to your Alert messages, you may also receive messages from the Public through your Local Area Pages, if these have been configured to allow this type of 'incoming contact'.

For any of these types of incoming messages, they will automatically use your 'escalation setup' where you can set a list of words to be checked for in these messages, and then have those messages escalated to a Team for more urgent attention.

Alongside our updates to the message sending process this escalation process has also been enhanced to allow more specific escalation options, where you can create local escalation setups to escalate messages to a local team, based on the location of the member replying.
 

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Viewing Replies

You can view your current message replies from 'Your Messages' from Rapport Home.

Open replies awaiting a response are highlighted as open tickets. Click these to view and reply. ​

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When viewing the details of a reply, you can also view the initial Alert the respondent is replying to.

As well as responding to the reply in the 'Public reply' section, you can also forward this to an email address, assign the reply to another Admin to deal with and, for any replies assigned to your Team, you can claim that reply as one that you will resolve.

You can use 'Mark' / 'Send' to change the message status. This could be useful to close the message if you choose not to reply to it, or to mark a reply as pending if you have asked the replier for further details.

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(Options with entered reply text to send)

To view replies that have been assigned to your administrator team rather than to you directly you, can go to: 'Your Messages​' > 'Team Inbox'.

This may be useful if an admin is on leave as and has assigned the replies for one of their messages to the whole team, to enable those replies to be dealt with by another administrator on their behalf.

You can also view all messages sent by you and other admins in your Team(s) from the 'overview' option:

 

Dealing with escalated replies

While the user reply option isn't supposed to be used for reporting crime, it's important that if a user does report a serious problem, these issues can be escalated and dealt with properly.

The Escalation feature can be used to detect certain key words in an alert and then automatically assign the replies to a specified team. Further details can be found in this guide: Main Admin - Escalation setup (Super User)

If you are a part of a team that is set to deal with these escalated replies, you should receive an email notification, when such a reply is received. Furthermore, on the Rapport home screen, the number of escalated replies should be shown along with any other replies:

Using this option will allow you to view the particular escalated reply and the message that it was sent in response to, you can then action this reply as needed, per the above details.

If it the reply is deemed to not be a correct escalation, you can De-escalate the message.

When a message reply is de-escalated, this will automatically assign that reply back to the original admin or team as was designated when that Alert was sent (in cases where this is a specific admin, the team would still have view of that reply too though).

This does differ slightly to when a direct incoming message is de-escalated, in which case these must be re-assigned to the relevant team manually.