Using Automation and Placeholders to Acknowledge New Conversations

Overview

You can create a customized trigger to send an auto reply notification informing the customer that you successfully received their email and created conversation. You can tweak the acknowledgment trigger and customize the email to be sent to the customer by placing dynamic contents using placeholders.

Diagnosis

A trigger can be created to send an automatic email acknowledgment every time you receive a new conversation. The trigger is set to send whatever message you enter within it once it detected that a new conversation has arrived in your inbox. Customizing your email templates for your communications such as notifications, acknowledgments, etc., gives a more authentic and meaningful support experience when the interaction is tailored to your customer needs. This means that you don't just want to send a generic canned response to your customers because, in Kayako, you can add dynamic contents such as the customer's name, the subject of their email, their case ID, and etc., which will add more value to the communication.

This is where placeholders would come into play.  Kayako has a wide variety of placeholders available so don't forget to check out the Placeholders for Customizing Email Templates, Macros, and Notifications article.

Back to top

Prerequisite

• To create a new trigger in Kayako, you will need an administrator account with the 'Manage automations' permission.

Back to top

Solution

1. Log into your Kayako and go to the admin panel.
2. Click Triggers under AUTOMATION.
3. Click on the New trigger button.
   
   
4. In the Rule Title field, add a descriptive title.
   Note: It is essential to use a good naming convention to keep track of triggers.
   
   
   
5. In the 'When these conditions are met' section, configure the following:
   

   • From the 'Select a condition' drop-down, choose Conversations: Update type.

   • From the next drop-down, select 'equal to'.

   • In the next blank field, select New conversation created.
     
     
     
     

   • You may want to exclude internal users from receiving auto-responses for new conversations.
     The most convenient way to do this, is exclude your company email domains via the following filter:
     Requester: Primary email - does not contain - <yourcompany.com> 
     Make sure to use AND operator. If you use OR, this filtering criteria will not work. 
     
     
     
     NOTE: You can further define the conditions by adding the AND condition and specify which source channels you want to send an acknowledgment (the Rule Settings section can be used as a substitute for this condition if you only want to use this trigger to a single channel), or if this rule is to be applied only to a specific brand. Learn more about creating automation by visiting the Creating Automations with Triggers and Monitors article.
     

6. From the 'Perform the following actions' section, select Notification: Email a user.
7. In the next blank field select (Requester).
8. Enter the subject in the Subject field and your message in the Message box. This is where you can utilize the placeholders to make your content more dynamic. (see samples below)
9. Click the Save button to create the trigger. 
   
   
   

Back to top

Confirmation

Every time you receive a new conversation, an acknowledgment email will be sent to the requester. The email will look like the sample below: 

NOTE: The arrows point to the content referenced by the placeholders we used in the sample above.

Back to top