Automations

An automation is a rule: when something happens to a ticket and every condition matches, its actions run in order. Use automations to route, label, prioritize and acknowledge tickets without anyone touching them. Managing automations needs the admin role; open Settings, Automations, in the Inbox group.

1. New automation: create a rule.
2. A rule: its name, and a summary of its trigger, conditions and actions. Click it to edit.
3. Runs and switch: how many times it has run, and whether it is on.
4. Paused: a rule that is switched off. It keeps its settings and does not run.

Automations run in order, top to bottom. Drag a rule to move it.

Build an automation

1. Click New automation and name it

   A name that says what the rule does, like “Escalate SSO outages”, makes the list easy to read.

2. Choose when it runs

   Under When, pick the trigger.

   

   Trigger	Runs when
   A ticket is created	A new ticket arrives on any channel.
   The customer replies	The customer sends a new message on a ticket.
   An agent replies	An agent sends a reply.
   A ticket is updated	A ticket’s fields change, such as its status, priority or team.

3. Add conditions

   Under If all of these match, click Add condition, pick a field, how to compare it, and a value. Every condition must match. A rule with no conditions runs every time its trigger fires.

   Besides the ticket’s text and sender, a condition can check where a ticket came from and who owns it: the Address written to, the Team, the Brand and the Chat widget.

   

4. Add actions

   Under Then, click Add action for each thing the rule should do. They run in the order listed.

   

5. Save and switch it on

   Save the rule. The switch at the top turns it on or off; the count under its name shows how many times it has run.

Keep the order in mind

Each rule sees the ticket as the rules above it left it. A rule that sets a team at the top lets a later rule match on that team. When an action changes a ticket, rules on A ticket is updated run next.

Conditions

Field	What it checks
Subject, Message text	The ticket’s subject, or the text of the message.
Sender email	The sender’s address.
Channel	Email, chat, API or portal.
Mailbox	The mailbox the ticket arrived on.
Address written to	The exact address the first email was sent to, such as an alias like refunds@. is, is not or contains, ignoring case.
Team	The ticket’s team, or no team.
Brand	The ticket’s brand.
Chat widget	The chat widget the conversation started on, or none.
Priority, Severity, Status	Current values. Severity can be “No severity”.
Tag	A label on the ticket.
Sentiment	What triage recorded: positive, neutral, negative or frustrated.
Ask Ollie a yes/no question	A question Ollie answers about the ticket. See below.
Ticket and contact fields	A custom field of the ticket or of its contact.

Text fields compare with contains, doesn’t contain, is and is not. Custom fields use the comparisons of their type, like is at least for a number, is any of for a select, and is set or is empty.

Actions

Action	What it does
Set status to, Set priority to, Set severity to	Changes the value. Severity can be cleared.
Assign to	Assigns a member.
Assign to team	Moves the ticket to a team, recorded as routed by an automation. An unassigned ticket is then assigned within that team.
Set reply address	Picks the address replies go out from. It must be an address of the ticket’s brand; otherwise, or when the address was removed, the action is skipped.
Add tag, Remove tag	Adds or removes a label. In a group of one label at a time, adding one replaces the group’s other label.
Set field	Fills in a ticket custom field. Leave it empty to clear the field.
Send a reply	Sends a reply to the customer. See Automatic replies.
Add an internal note	Adds a note only the team sees.
Mark as spam	Moves the ticket to Spam.
Run AI triage	Runs triage on the ticket: one AI call, charged to the AI balance on Cloud.

Automatic replies

A Send a reply action is careful not to start mail loops or answer machines:

• It goes out marked as an automatic message, so other systems do not reply to it.
• It is skipped for automatic, bulk or list mail, mail that asks for no automatic answers, mail from a no-reply address or from one of your own addresses, and mail that failed sender checks.
• It is sent at most 3 times per ticket, and 10 times per customer an hour.

Ask Ollie a question

Ask Ollie a yes/no question lets a rule depend on something only a reader can tell. Write a question, like “Is the customer at risk of churning?”, and choose whether the probability of yes must be above or below a value from 1% to 99%.

• The question is 3 to 300 characters of plain text. A rule can have at most 3.
• Ollie decides with the instance’s decision model when one is set up, else with the configured AI model.
• Every question in one run is asked together, in one call, charged once to the AI balance on Cloud. The answers are reused for the rest of the run.
• When AI is off, the AI balance is too low or the call fails, the condition does not hold and the rule does not run.

Routing rules do not answer AI questions while a ticket is routed. To route on one, use an automation on A ticket is created with this condition and Assign to team.

Examples

• Urgent keywords. When a ticket is created, if Subject contains “outage”, set priority to Urgent and assign to team On call.
• Refund alias. When a ticket is created, if Address written to is refunds@example.com, assign to team Billing and add tag Refund.
• Brand reply address. When a ticket is created, if Brand is Pressroom, set reply address to help@pressroom.example.
• Chat follow up. When a ticket is created, if Chat widget is “Pricing page”, set priority to High.
• Major incidents. When a ticket is updated, if Severity is Sev 1, assign to team On call and add an internal note.
• Churn risk. When the customer replies, if Ollie thinks the customer is at risk of churning with a probability above 70%, add tag Churn risk.
• Reopen on reply. When the customer replies, if Status is Pending, set status to Open.

Related

• Routing
• Triage and assignment
• SLA policies
• Automations API