Automation Action: Trigger a Message

One of the most popular Automation actions in Textline is to send a message to a contact.  This is a very powerful action as it can perform a variety of purposes:

• Send an out of hours response
• Welcome new contacts to your texting service
• Give customers directions to your upcoming event when they're lost
• Send a thank you gif when you resolve a conversation

When using this action, there are a few other options tied to the message that you can enable and we will cover those below

Prevent lower priority Automations from sending messages

This checkbox is one that will affect other Automations in your Department.  If you have this checkbox ticked and the triggers for this Automation are set, then no other messages will be sent.  A good use case for this checkbox is to have an Automation setup for holiday or out of office responses.

Suppress agent Notifications and wait time warnings

This checkbox helps with Notifications.  If you have it ticked, it will prevent Notifications to Agents associated with the Conversation (you can read more on Notification settings here) when this action is fired.  This checkbox is helpful for when you have messages stating your office hours and you do not want your Agents bothered off hours.

This message counts towards metrics calculations

This checkbox is in regards to our Metrics feature.  There are a number of metrics that can be triggered by automations.  By default, automations do not affect most metrics, but when ticking this box, you can have automations now included in metrics tabulations.  Check the Metrics Definitions article for a full accounting of what metrics will be affected by this checkbox.  A great use case is for having out of hours messages responding to customers and then lowering your time to response metric, instead of having the clock running the whole time your office is closed.