Increase your support team’s efficiency and build automation Workflows that can trigger automated messages and manage conversations which have been inactive for a chosen period of time.
This can be done using purpose-built triggers and actions.
Workflow triggers:
Actions:
These actions are available in any bot triggers.
Customer has been unresponsive
Note: This trigger will not fire for conversations created via our REST API.
This trigger is great for automatically handling conversations where the customer has not responded for a selected period of time.
First, go to Automation > Workflows and click New workflow.
Choose Create from scratch and use the trigger "Customer has been unresponsive".
Then set the inactivity timer to control how long a customer should be idle in a conversation before the workflow is triggered.
The duration must be longer than 30 seconds and shorter than 14 days.
You can choose to build your workflow in a number of ways. Here’s an example:
Set trigger timer to 10 minutes - meaning that the workflow will only trigger 10 minutes after a customer goes idle in the conversation.
This is where you can also set up the trigger rules, scheduling and goal.
Start the workflow with a bot message stating ‘Just checking if you are still there. Let us know if you need any help!’
Add a Wait action that delays further bot messages. Configure how long the wait time should last and whether this can be interrupted if a teammate or customer replies.
Add a bot message after the Wait action which says ‘This conversation will now be closed’. Then add another action to Close conversation.
Now click Save to preview your new Workflow or set it live!
Note:
When a customer has been unresponsive - A bot will only fire if a customer has been inactive after a teammate reply, for the length of time specified.
When a teammate snoozes a conversation - A bot will fire if a teammate manually snoozes a conversation.
When a new outbound conversation is created - If you create a new outbound message from the Help Desk, the bot will fire when the customer is unresponsive. But it will not fire for messages sent from the Proactive Support section of Intercom. The customer most reply first for the outbound message to become a conversation. Once it becomes a conversation, the bot can jump in.
When a teammate has been unresponsive
Note: This trigger will not fire for conversations created via our REST API.
This is great for rerouting conversations to a new Inbox when a teammate does not reply to a customer message within a certain time period.
First, go to Automation > Workflows and click New workflow.
Choose Create from scratch and use the trigger "Teammate has been unresponsive".
Then set the inactivity timer to control how long a teammate has not responded to a conversation before the Workflow is triggered.
Note: The duration must be longer than 30 seconds and shorter than 14 days and is evaluated against customer's first message.
This means if the customer sends 3 messages in a row, the timer will be set against their first message, not last.
You can choose to build your workflow in a number of ways. Here’s an example:
Set trigger timer to 10 minutes - meaning the workflow will only trigger when there’s no response from any teammate 10 minutes after the customer sends their first reply.
This is where you can also set up the trigger rules, scheduling and goal.
Start the workflow with a bot message stating, ‘Thank you for your patience. We will try to get back to you as soon as possible!’
Apply actions to Mark as priority and Tag conversation e.g. ‘response delayed’.
Then add an action to Assign conversation to reroute the conversation to the desired Inbox.
Now click Save and close to preview your new Workflow or set it live!
Note:
This Workflow trigger will also fire after a customer starts a conversation or it leaves the bot inbox before a teammate's first response.
If you are using Article suggestions Basics automation at the start of the conversation, the system will wait for your user to close the article after they've seen it. Until that happens, workflow will simply wait for that event or an additional message from the user. When article gets closed, then it is expected behaviour to go on to collect feedback on the article and se if it helped. But while the article suggestion is waiting for the user to check out the article, any other triggers like teammate inactivity won't be proceeding, thus workflow won't trigger.
Using these triggers to auto-close abandoned conversations
Both of these triggers can also be used to auto-close abandoned workflow conversations from Automation > Settings.
Wait action
Delay the next bot step with a Wait action to set the pace and control the timing of each new bot step.
This is available in the Workflows builder when adding actions.
Using the Wait action, you can better control when CSAT is sent by adding a Wait action prior to adding the CSAT action.
Click on the Wait block to configure the wait time in a side drawer, and whether this should be interrupted if a teammate or customer replies during that time.
Note:
Assigned teammates adding actions such as conversation tags will not interrupt the Wait action.
An interrupted Wait action will automatically end the workflow.
A Conversation closed by an automation of any kind will also interrupt the wait action
Snooze action
Use the Snooze action to temporarily remove a conversation from a teammate’s inbox.
This is available in the Workflows builder when adding actions.
Click on the Snooze block and select how long the conversation should be snoozed.
Note:
Customer replies will interrupt the Snooze action.
Teammate replies will also interrupt the Snooze action. But teammates adding actions such as conversation tags will not interrupt it.
An interrupted Snooze action will automatically end the workflow.
A workflow can continue after a Snooze action has come to an end. For example:
Customer is not responsive for 10 minutes.
Auto send a follow up reply + snooze for 24 hrs.
Auto send another follow up reply + snooze for 48 hrs.
Auto send a closing message + close + tag this conversation was auto-closed because the customer did not respond.
Learn more about building rules based automations in Workflows.
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