Common uses of Message Rules

Use eDesk's Message Rules to automate ticket management, giving your team more time to deliver 5 star customer support.

This help file provides some examples of how you can use Message Rules to automatically manage customer tickets.

Before you start

You’ll need to have access to Message Rules in your Settings in order to view, create and edit Message Rules. If you don’t have access, you can request it from an Admin user within your business

Note: For an introduction to Message Rules, click here.

01 Automatically assign tags to tickets

Tags allow you to automatically route tickets into useful categories in your Mailbox. To learn all about Tags, click here.

Example: A shipment of faulty bike parts arrived from your supplier and, due to an error, the products were sent to customers that ordered through Amazon France. This has resulted in a barrage of tickets from upset and confused customers. To help you prioritize these tickets, you set up a Tag called A1 Faulty Cassette and then create a Message Rule that automatically assigns the Tag A1 Faulty Cassette to any tickets that meet the following conditions:

Product title - CONTAINS - "A1 Speedy Bike Cassette"
AND
Ticket channel - ANY OF THESE - "Amazon.fr - Joes Bikes"
Next, set the Action to Assign to tags - A1 Faulty Cassette.
Once you set up your Rule, you can go back to your Mailbox and pin the A1 Faulty Cassette tag to the side to create a folder so it's easily accessible. To find out more about Pinned Filters, click here.

When tickets arrive via Amazon.fr that relate to the product A1 Speedy Bike Cassette, they will be routed automatically to the A1 Faulty Cassette pinned filter in your Mailbox, so that you can respond promptly and personally to the customer.
Pinned Filter AI Faulty Cassette To learn how to set up Message Rules, click here.

02 Automatically assign tickets to Support Agents

Message Rules can be set up to automatically assign certain tickets to particular people, OR they can use a round-robin to automatically assign tickets to your team members in rotation.

Example: Juliette handles all cancellations and return requests in French. You can ensure that these tickets are assigned to Juliette as soon as they arrive, by setting up a Message Rule with the following conditions:

Message language - ANY OF THESE - French
AND
Ticket type - ANY OF THESE - Cancellation, Return Request
Next, set the Action to Assign ticket owner - Juliette.
Now, when a cancellation or return request in French language arrives, eDesk will automatically make Juliette the Owner, and the tickets will be displayed in the My Tickets category in her Mailbox.
French cancellation requests in My Tickets To learn more about assigning tickets, click here.

Pro Tip: If you want to assign tickets evenly between all the members of your Support Team so that the workload is shared fairly between all team members, this is where you need a round-robin. To find out how to set one up, click here.

03 Automatically @mention a user

You might know in advance that a teammate will always be interested in a particular kind of ticket so this is where you can set up a Message Rule to automatically @mention this person if the ticket meets certain conditions.

Example: Divya is a Manager who is interested in seeing eBay tickets that report negative feedback, but wants the Support Agents to own the ticket and handle the customer query. You set up a Message Rule that will @mention Divya on the relevant tickets. It has the following Conditions:

Marketplace - ANY OF THESE - eBay
AND
Ticket type - ANY OF THESE - Negative Feedback
Next, set the Action to Mention users - Diyva.
Now when tickets arrive that deliver Negative Feedback for eBay orders, Divya will be mentioned automatically on the ticket, and the ticket will be listed in the Mentioned category in her Mailbox.

04 Automatically close tickets that need no further action

Sometimes messages are sent to your eDesk account, but they do not need any action from your team. If these messages have common features, such as a particular subject or email address, you can set up a Message Rule to automatically set the status of the tickets to Resolved.

Example: eBay is sending you system message notifications, and the messages are cluttering up your Mailbox and distracting you from delivering amazing customer support! To address this, simply set up a Message Rule that closes these tickets as soon as they arrive.

Ticket Type - any of these - System Message
AND
Ticket Channel - any of these - eBay
Next, set the Action to Change ticket status - Mark as Resolved.
Now when an eBay system message is received, the ticket status will be set to Resolved automatically.

To learn what else you can do to reduce system messages, click here.

05 Automatically respond with a pre-written Message Template

Rather than manually answering the same questions again and again on repeat, you can set up eDesk to use pre-written templates to reply automatically to common queries. You can even tailor these replies to include personalized information about the customer's order by using Snippets.

Example: Customers often send messages asking you to confirm when they will receive their order. Your Customer Support team spends a lot of time answering these messages personally. You decide to set up eDesk to answer these particular queries automatically, which will free up the team to focus on the messages that do need a personal response.

1) You set up a Rule-only template called 'Auto-response - Delivery date' that reads:

Dear #consumer_firstname#,

Your order of #product_name# has left our warehouse and should be delivered between from #expected_delivery_date_from# to #expected_delivery_date_to#.

Hope that helps, and thanks for contacting Customer Support.

Jessie
Joe's Bikes

2) Next, you need to set up a Message Rule with the following conditions:

Ticket type - ANY OF THESE - Shipping query
AND
Ticket status - ANY OF THESE - Order shipped, In transit
Next, set the Action to Bind an Autoresponder - 'Auto-response - Delivery date'.
Now when a shipping query arrives after the order has been dispatched, eDesk will automatically send the Rule-only template Auto-response - Delivery date to the customer. The #snippets# in the template are populated with the real information for that customer and order.

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