Auto-response

One of the great things you can do with WFA is sending automated responses to your customers based on your needs. For example, your support team doesn’t work during public holidays and you want to tell them that the agents will reply the following day.

In this guide, we will set up such auto-response to be sent to any customer reaching out to you outside your business hours (BH). Please note that this is only applicable to private channels (Direct Messages, Whatsapp) as you could get tagged for spamming and blocked on public channels.

Okay, let’s get into it!

Queues

First, we need to have a separate routing queue for within and outside the Business Hours.

Create the first queue with filters and desired messaging channels. The key filter in this situation is the “Date and time rule”. It says when should the cases route into the queue.

We want to have the first queue to take cases created within our Business Hours.
Since our Business Hours are Mon-Fri, 9 AM to 11 PM it should look like this:

Now, we create the second Queue for cases created outside the Business Hours. It will have the same filters except for the “Date and time rule” to cover the outside business hours. That is from 11:01 PM to 8:59 AM.

Now that we have separated the cases to their respective queues, we set up which cases will receive the out of office hours message.

Job

We start by creating the Job.

Let’s create a job with the “Send Message” action. Naming will help you to identify it easily. We chose “Message out of BH”. Choose which agent should be the author of this message and type in the content.

 

Triggers

Now it’s time to set up the trigger for the message. Create a new one, choose the event "Case created"

in conditions, we can choose the channels (DMs)  and the case status - new.
We also need to choose the Queue where the action should trigger. IN our case it is the Out of BH queue:

Click Save, go back to Triggers and click Jobs to assign our “Message Out of BH” job to the trigger.

Once we have saved everything, every new case coming outside the business hours will be routed to our “outside business hours” and that will trigger our autoresponse to send. Note that the messages are sent as resolved, so we need to change their status to be able to route them to the agents.

Changing status back to New

This one is easy! 

Simply go the jobs and create a new one 'Set Case to New'. Choose the change case status and status. In our case we chose new.

 

Now only thing you need to do is add the job to our trigger. This will result in sending the message and then changing the case status back to new.

Re-routing

Now there is one tricky part to this!

Since the case was routed and responded to, it will stay in the out of BH queue in the status set up by the previous job. That means that even if the customer writes another message the case status will change to open but it will stay in this queue.

And that is why we want to re-route all the cases back to our first queue (within business hours) so our agents can resolve them once they are online.

So we will create another job.

This time we will choose “Reroute case to a different queue” action and the destination queue.

Now in the Schedulers, we want to choose when should the cases go back into our agent queue. We create one for 8:59 every morning using the crontab format  59 8 */1 * *. Find a detailed article on rerouting here.

Add the Job “Reroute the queue” by clicking on “Jobs” and save.

Back in the Schedulers click the Conditions. Choose the channels and more importantly the queue where we want to take the cases from. In our case, it’s “DM out of BH”.

 
Make sure to also select the “Current case assignment” to “The case is waiting in the queue” with “Case status” NEW, OPEN or PENDING to ensure all relevant cases are re-routed. 

 
With this setup, all the new, open or pending cases are going to be re-routed to our agent queue at 8:59 AM every morning so your agents can follow up with the customers.

Don’t have Workflow Automation yet? Contact your Account Manager :)