What are Rules and Its Components?

Rules can help you manage and automate frequent activities by triggering a response or action when a Conversation meets the right conditions.

With Rules, you can:

• Send an auto-reply to Customers whenever an email comes in.
• Add Topic(s) to a Conversation.
• Route a message with the word “Returns” to a specific Inbox.
• Reassign a Conversation or Task that has become overdue
• + more!

Rules allow you to automate manual processes for your team and help your team be extra efficient. With the time you save, you can focus more on making your Customers happy.

Components of a Rule #

There are three main components to a Rule:

1. Trigger
2. Condition(s)
3. Action(s)

Rules are executed When a defined Trigger is detected, And Condition(s) are met, Then Actions are taken, which complete a Rule.

1. Trigger #

Trigger is an event that sets the wheels in motion for a Rule. Each Trigger may have additional qualifiers that need to be selected. 

The following Triggers and qualifiers are available to use in Rules:

2. Condition(s) #

Condition(s) narrows down the set of Triggered events on which the Rule will act. A Rule can have no Conditions, 1 Condition, or several. Some Conditions are only relevant for specific Triggers so that the options list may vary. 

The following Conditions are available to use in Rules:

Multiple Conditions #

You can achieve even more granularity in your Rules by adding multiple “And” Conditions. Each Condition you add is a logical “And” statement. For example, if you create a Rule with “Message Subject” and “Channel,” the Rule will only execute if both “Message Subject” and “Channel” Conditions are met. 

Inclusions and Exclusions #

Certain Conditions use “Includes” and “Excludes” as additional qualifiers, where “Includes” means the selected items must be met for the Condition to apply. “Excludes” means that the Condition can be fulfilled by excluding any selected items.

“All of” and “Any of” #

“All of” means every item specified must be there to qualify (logical “AND”). “Any of” means only one of the items specified needs to be there to qualify (logical “OR”).

Text Matching #

Some of the Conditions above look for matching text to determine whether the Condition is met. These “text matching” Conditions follow very similar patterns that are helpful to understand.

Whether the content contains or does not contain the provided text allows you to target based on your requirements. 

The type of text matching — Any, Only, RegEx, or Words — is an important distinction.

How to choose between Any, Only, and Words

Match Text Condition	Description
Any	• The text you’re searching for can appear anywhere in the content being searched and does not have to be the only text. For example, the phrase “Happy Birthday” appears in the content “Happy Birthday to you!” and would be matched using Any.  • Use quotation marks for longer text to bound a word or sentence. Note – Watch out for potential implications of using this Condition. For example, if a Rule is configured to move messages that contain “exchange” to a particular Inbox, the word “change” could also trigger the Rule to execute. Think about using Words (more below) instead to create exact matches of distinctive words you wish to add.
Only	• The text you’re searching for must match exactly with the content. Except for leading and trailing spaces, the content must be precisely the same, with nothing more or less. This matching type is most useful for matching email addresses, custom attribute values, and predictable text like automated email subject lines. For example, the phrase “Happy Birthday” would not match the content “Happy Birthday to you!” using Only because the text strings don’t precisely match. • Multiple phrases cant be matched using Only. For example: “hello, re:hello” will search for “hello, re: hello” and not “hello” or “re: hello.”
RegEx	Short for Regular Expression, a form of light coding that lets you match patterns in the text without specifying the entire string. This is particularly useful for distinguishing words that can be part of other words, like “log” and “catalog,” or for matching phrases that may have variable text. For example, by using RegEx, “Happy .* to you!” would be matched to “Happy Birthday to you!”, “Happy New Year to you!” and “Happy to send the receipt to you!”.  • Another example, to ensure the word “exchange” is not associated with the word “change,” a RegEx would look like:  ◦For multiple words, you’ll need to incorporate parentheses and a pipe separator. It would be as follows: \bchange\b|\bhell\b|\god\b. • To match exact text, or a group, you’d use great,?\s* thanks|[Ss]ure thing, which would match both “great, thanks” (with or without the comma) and “Sure thing” (capital or lower-case “s”). Ultimately, the point is just that you can add more than one regex pattern into a rule with the pipe | but not end a syntax with a pipe. •Check out examples of how to use Regex  and how to work with RegEx . We suggest working with a developer or engineer if you still need assistance. •RegEx matching follows Google’s re2 library . •To check your regular expression, you can use a service like Rubular .
Words	Words allow you to create text-matching Rules that look for whole words (or multi-word phrases) that might sometimes be a part of another word. You can provide a comma-separated list of words or multi-word phrases when setting up a Condition. Whatever is placed between the commas (except leading and trailing spaces) will be searched for, but only found if it’s a complete word, and not if it appears within another word. • Single Word – For example, the words “all,” “ask,” and “bask” are contained within the word “basketball,” but if you’re only looking for the word “ask” and don’t want the Rule to trigger when “basketball” comes up, then choose Words rather than Any. You can also use RegEx to detect whole words, but sometimes the RegEx encoding can be tricky, so Words allows for a simpler, more predictable setup. • Multi-Word Phrase – Configure multiple words like “attendee list” and “software payment notification” separated by commas. The Rule is only triggered if the entire phrase matches.

Number Comparison Operators #

Some attributes may introduce numerical values as an identifier. Using comparison operators (Between, Equal to, Greater than, Greater or equal, Less than, Less or equal), these numerical values can be used for automation. For example, let’s say you have a custom attribute called “Loyalty Points,” which is used to track the accumulated lifetime loyalty points of a Customer, and you want to route Customers with 1,000,000 points or more to your VIP Inbox, then the Condition could look like If Loyalty Points is Greater than or equal to 1,000,000.

Number and Currency attributes provide the same operators; however, with Currency attributes, you will need to select the currency type expected. Using the chosen currency type, Rules will extract either currency symbols or 3-letter ISO codes that appear before the number, which is then evaluated like a number.

For example, if you have a Rule that says If Total Spent is greater than 400 USD, these formats of the total spent will succeed: “$500”, and “USD 500”. However, formats with the code or symbol appearing after the number will not succeed: “500 USD” or “500 $”.

3. Action(s) #

Action determines what will happen if the Conditions are met for a given Trigger. Each Rule must have at least 1 Action, and you can add multiple Actions.

The following Actions are available to use in Rules: