Textline’s Automations are a powerful tool for increased flexibility. Automations allow you to set up automatic responses and allow you to control elements of your Conversations with things like keywords, response timing, and automatic Conversation assignments to Agents in your Textline organization.

You will be prompted to build an Automation from a Template or from scratch. You can read more on Automation Templates here.

You will then need to name your Automation and if needed, switch the Department in which you are building the new Automation.

You will then be presented with the three main elements of Automations: Automation Type, Automation Conditions, and Automation Action.

Determine the event that triggers an Automation. For example, you can set an Automation to trigger when a message is received, when an Agent sends a message, or when a Conversation is resolved. There is also an Automation type called Timer. This type allows Automations to fire based on time passed since an event. You can read more on the Automation type Timer here.

Conditions are the rules that define when the Action will occur. They can be set to ensure that Automations only fire if an event meets ALL of the Conditions set or ANY (at least one) of the conditions set. Conditions can include things like:

Actions are the end goal of an Automation, occurring when an Automation Type meets the selected Conditions. Actions can include things like:

Once you are done creating your Automation, the final screen will give you a natural language, sentence-based preview of what your Automation is doing. Also from this page, you can save it as a template to use as a basis for future Automation building or set it to disabled in case your Automation is not ready to go live.

It is important to note that the order in which your Automation appears in a Department matters. Actions from an Automation with a higher priority can affect the triggering and actions of an Automation lower on the list. It is important to order the automations in your Department in a way that sets the correct priority.

To reorder an Automation, hover your mouse over an Automation to expose the drag icon (6 dots) to the left. Click and hold the icon to drag the Automation to your desired location. Release the icon to save the change in order.

There may be situations where you want an Automation to run in limited instances, turn it off for a bit, and then re-enable it. You can do this by disabling an Automation.

To disable an Automation, hover your mouse over an Automation to expose the drag icon (6 dots) to the left. Click and hold the icon to drag the Automation and drag it down to the section for disabled Automations. Release the Automation to add it to the disabled list. Note: disabled automations do not need an order, so we sort these alphabetically.

To enable a disabled Automation, hover your mouse over the Automation to expose the drag icon (6 dots) to the left. Click and hold the icon to drag the Automation and drag it up to your desired location in the active Automations list. Release the icon to enable the Automation and save its place in the order. Remember that an Automation's location in the list matters.

We hope this article helps! If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to Textline support at +1 (415) 849-4349 or [email protected].