Rules - Best practicesUpdated a month ago

In this article, you will find use cases for rules, views, and actions in macros that you can replicate and customize for your business. We will be expanding this article over the coming weeks and months to include use cases that are common amongst specific industries and business types. You can use the table of contents on the left to easily jump to different sections.

Identifying priority tickets

Whether you want to identify loyal repeat customers, customers who are reaching out to cancel an order, or customers who are frustrated or disappointed, you can do that with rules and then can also set up corresponding views so that you can quickly and easily manage these tickets or ensure they are getting to the correct person. Take a look at the use cases below and remember that you can customize each one so that it will work for your business. 

Urgent tickets

You can set up a rule to auto-tag the ticket if the customer is showing impatience or mentions an urgent need.

Example: "Ordered the wrong item. Need to cancel immediately!"

Below you will see an example for the rule and the corresponding view.

Rule setup:

1. In Settings, go to Rules and click Create new rule
2. Select WHEN Ticket created and new message in ticket as a trigger
3. Click on THEN, and select an IF statement
4. Select ticket -> from agent -> IS -> false (this means that the ticket is not created by an agent)
5. Click on THEN, and select an IF statement
6. Choose -> message -> sentiments -> CONTAINS ONE OF -> urgent
7. Click on IF and select an ORstatement
8. Choose -> message body-> CONTAINS ONE OF -> then add keywords.
9. Click on following THEN, select Add tag as an action, and type "Urgent"
10. Click Save, and Activate

View setup:

VIP customers

With this rule you will be able to recognize customers with a high number of orders and create a view for them as you may want to give them some extra attention.

Snoozing tickets

Auto-snooze

Save time on one of the most common and redundant actions using auto-snooze rules! The video below will show you how to set up such a rule:

Delay action

You can now delay rule actions with a new trigger condition: when a ticket reopens after a snooze. The new rule trigger is called 'ticket snooze delay ends'. Here’s how you can use it to delay actions.

Example:

Let's say you want to follow up with your customers if they do not reply within X number of days.

You would first snooze the ticket that you want to follow up on for X days using the snooze function. Then, set a rule to trigger when the ticket is reopened after the snooze timeframe ends. It can look something like this:

You can use this trigger to perform any action currently supported by our rule engine like reply to customer, add tags, assign agents etc.

And rest assured, because of how snoozing works, a rule like this one will only trigger at the end of the set delay and not if it is reopened manually or when a customer replies back!

Auto-tag tickets

You can use your rules to add tags to the ticket at the moment they are created, which will help you sort them out in views, and organize your workflow based on your needs.

Cancel order

This rule is set to auto-assign to a specific agent. If you have an agent who works directly with fulfillment this is a great tool to use so that they can quickly address the issue and communicate within departments.

1. In Settings, go to Rules and click 'Create new rule'
2. Select WHENTicket created as a trigger
3. Click on THEN, and select an IF statement
4. Select ticket -> from agent -> IS -> false (this means that the ticket is not created by an agent)
5. Click again on IF button, and select AND
6. Choose -> message -> intents -> CONTAINS ONE OF -> order/cancel
7. Click on following THEN, select ASSIGN AGENT as an action, and type the name of the user.
8. Click again on following THEN, select Add tag as an action, and type "cancel".
9. Click 'Save', and Activate the rule

Damaged item

This rule is designed to let gather additional information needed so that you can process a replacement order for the customer. If you are dealing with packages damaged in transit then it will also allow you to access these tickets quickly and process all shipment claims at one time so that your workflow can remain efficient. You can utilize the same filters from the "Urgent" view and change the name of the tag to reflect accordingly.

Urgent order edit

You can use this rule to tag and the orders that have been placed recently and your customer reached out about changing them.

Identifying language in tickets

You can use the rule below to identify, tag, and assign tickets based on the language used by the customer. 

You can check the list of supported languages here.

Facebook and Instagram comments

We don't recommend setting up auto-reply rules for social media comments because they can be registered as spammy and deactivate your accounts. However, you can always auto-tag your social media posts and comments for easier sorting and handling!

Let's say you want to keep track of all of the positive things that your customers say about you online. Here's an example of such a rule:

You can then set up a view that will display all of these tickets in one place:

And you can do the same thing by creating a rule that will check comments for negative language as well, it never hurts to gather as much feedback as possible!

Auto-close rules

You can use this rule to close any tickets that are not from your customers. This way, any tickets that don't need attention from your agents will be closed automatically so that they don't clutter your views.

Mentions auto-close rule

This rule is super useful for stuff like giveaways for example. Giveaways are a really cool way to give back to your community and promote your products. However, because they generate a lot of noise and engagement, they sometimes tend to clutter your inbox/views with some comments that don't necessarily require your attention. This tends to happen outside of giveaways too.

Luckily, there's a small hack that you can use to detect and auto-close these with rules! Please have a look at the example below:

This rule will look for the tickets generated by your Instagram page, but only the ones where customers simply tagged each other without having any sort of comment or query for you to handle. Basically, it'll look for the ones that contain '@' and don't contain any spaces (that's the empty space in the 'message body does not contain any of' node, you would set it up by hitting the spacebar and then 'enter'). And then the rule will simply auto-close these types of tickets to get them out of your hair.

Facebook auto-close rule

You can set up a similar rule for Facebook tickets as well, but only using the 'no space' condition described above and intents. This is because Facebook mentions don't contain an '@'. However, please keep in mind that this rule will then affect any single-word comment and not just mentions and emojis! Then, you can also add conditions pertaining to message intents to make it more precise, by excluding all intents apart from 'other/no reply':

Auto-close notifications

In this specific example, you can set up the rule to automatically close payment notifications. You can modify it to apply to any notifications you are getting.

Auto-close tickets from a certain user

You can set this rule up if you wish to automatically close tickets from a certain user (this is very useful if you wish to block them, and will apply to Facebook comments and messenger as well).

Auto-reply rules

To further automate your work, you can set up rules that will send out an automated response. Depending on the situation, you can use them to let your customers know when you are available, answer their most commonly asked questions, provide them with their tracking number, etc.

Business hours auto-response

If you are wanting to create an automated response to be sent either during business hours or after business hours you can use one or both of the examples below for that. 

During business hours:

Outside of business hours:

Keep in mind that this rule will trigger just for the email tickets that arrive outside business hours. We do not recommend setting this rule for Facebook/Instagram comments since they can be flagged as spam.

Auto-replies with Shopify variables

You can set up your rules to automatically reply to your customers using the information you have on file for specific inquiries. For example, inquires like "Where is my order" can easily be automated. Here are a few examples of how you can set up automation on your account.

Order status auto-reply when the tracking number is available

This rule will send an automated message with tracking information when a customer inquires about their order status and their order has shipped.

Auto-reply when the tracking number is not available

This rule will send out an automated message with the status URL when an order has not shipped yet but has not exceeded the processing time.

You can also check out this article for setting up a rule that would trigger just for the customers that have Shopify data.

Internal note auto-reply

You can now automate your internal communication too! Here's an example showing how you can automatically add an internal note in combination with the Intents feature:

Auto-reply or auto-close a ticket after snooze delay ends

If you're looking for a way to automatically follow up with clients whose tickets you have snoozed and auto-close those rules after a follow up has been sent, you can use the following rule setup:

Rules based on intents

Here's an example how to create a rule based on message intents. If you're not familiar with our intents feature already, please have a look at this guide first.

OOO un-assignment rule

You can create a rule to automatically un-assign a ticket when your agent is on vacation or sick leave:

We also have a number of helpful video tutorials on the most common rule setups here 👈

Rule not working as expected? There can be several reasons why. Some of the most common ones are listed here 👈