TABLE OF CONTENTS


What is Advanced Automations

Automate your daily chat workflows, save time for your Agents, and help them focus on tasks that matter, with Advanced Automations.


Advanced Automations is available as an app in the Freshchat Appstore (Marketplace). Click here to get the app.


Type of workflows you can create with Advanced Automations


With Advanced Automations you can create four types of workflows,

  1. Auto Response - You can automate chat responses

  2. Auto Resolve - You can auto-resolve conversations

  3. Auto Assignment - You can automate conversation assignment  to a specific agent or group

  4. Auto Escalation - You can auto-escalate a conversation to a specific agent or a group 


How to Install Advanced Automations

To install,

  1. Go to Admin Settings > Marketplace Apps > In the search bar, type Advanced Automations
  2. On the Advanced Automations page click Install.




Once installed, click on the gear icon in the right and select Settings.



Before you can start using Automations, you need to add the API key and SDK APP ID of your Freshchat account. 



How to get API key and SDK APP ID

To get your API key, go to Admin > API Settings > Complete captcha > Under Your API Key > Click Copy




To get SDK APP ID, go to Admin > Mobile SDK > Start setup > Near App ID, click Copy



Once you add both the keys, click Save. You can now start using the predefined workflows or create custom workflows.


Under Advanced options, You can choose the timezone to be displayed in the transcripts generated using Advanced Automations.




You can also choose to toggle the APIs and Custom Placeholders functionality here. 

 Learn more about


Predefined workflows

With predefined workflows, the most common use cases are automated and you can use it with a click of a button. Advanced Automation comes with 3 predefined workflows.


  1. Assign to first responder - Assigns a conversation to the first agent who replies/sends a message on the conversation.

  2. Auto resolve if user does not respond - Auto resolves a conversation if a customer does not send a response message for a set time of 120 seconds (2 minutes).

  3. Send first response - If all your agents are busy, you can send an automated reply message to a customer waiting for a response. For example, you can send an automated message that says “Thank you for your patience, one of us will get back to you shortly”.



How to create custom workflows

Set the Triggers

Let’s say you need to create a custom automation to send a specific reply to a customer who has reached out with a coding related issue they are facing during your business hours. To create this custom automation,


Click Create an Automation,



Give a name to your workflow and define the Trigger for the automation.



Note:
1) When using Freddy triggers (like "Freddy assigns a group" or "Freddy assigns an agent"), set the condition to "First response due" instead of just "Response due." If you use "Response due," the automation won’t trigger because the conversation is waiting for the first response after being assigned to a new agent or group.
2) To trigger the action "Make available for assignment," a group must already be assigned to the conversation. If no group is assigned, "Make available for assignment" won’t be triggered.
3) When using triggers for conversation initiation (like "User starts a conversation"), avoid conditions based on assigned agents, assigned groups, or conversation status, as the agent, group, are not set at the start and conversation status during initiation is always 'New'. Use other conditions that fit your automation needs. 
4) If you use the trigger "Message was sent by user/agent" with a condition that filters for business hours, it will check the message’s timestamp against the business hour settings. It won’t consider the conversation initiation timestamp for business hour conditions.
5) For automations with auto-resolve triggers and label-based conditions, the automation won’t trigger because the auto-resolve feature assigns the label only after resolving the conversation. Thus, when the condition check occurs with the trigger "auto resolve resolves the conversation," the label won’t be assigned yet. Instead, use the following:
Trigger: System assigns the label
Condition: Conversation status is resolved and label is 'X'



Define your workflow conditions

Next, configure the Conditions for your automation workflow.



Note: 
1) SLA related fields on the conditions section can only be used if the trigger used is either First response SLA was breached or Next response SLA was breached.
2) When the condition Conversation status is New then the criteria used for matching is Conversation is Open and unassigned. When the condition Conversation status is Assigned the criteria used for matching is Conversation is Open and assigned.
3) The message text filter only looks at messages created by the system after the trigger. If you set the keyword to "hi" and the trigger is "System assigned a conversation to an agent," it won’t match because "hi" would need to be in a message that happened before the system assignment. The filter doesn’t check messages from before the trigger.
4) The user property update action for date and date/time fields will work if the date provided is in the format: 2024-08-19T14:11:36+05:30.



Add the follow-up action

Choose an action that needs to be performed once the conditions are satisfied. You can add more than one action.



There are multiple types of actions that you can set up here. These include but are not limited to triggering an API, or sending transcripts via email to customers, or updating any user properties that you have.

For use cases where you want to send the entire conversation transcript to the user, use the following action:

When the goal is to update user properties such as email, phone, first name, or last name, please use the respective actions for each field.


Schedule your automation

By default, the automation actions will be executed immediately once the configured conditions are satisfied. You can choose to schedule the action to be executed at a later time. To do this, enable the ‘Schedule actions’ toggle by switching it to the right.



Review your workflow

In the summary tab, you can review the automation details and make any changes if needed before taking it live. Click Finish and save your automation.



You’ll be able to see a list of all the workflows you’ve created under Automations.



You can enable/disable automation with the toggle switch. You can also edit, clone, or delete automation.



How to create Freshdesk Ticket in Advanced Automations

You can create a Freshdesk ticket as an Action in Advanced Automation.



For example, Let’s say you want to create a Freshdesk ticket when an assigned agent hasn’t responded for more than 4 minutes. For this, you can trigger automation when a user sends a message for which the status is ‘assigned’ and is ‘due for a response’ for more than 4 minutes.



The Freshdesk ticket description will contain the transcript of the conversation from the time it was last resolved. Also, The Freshdesk ticket created will have all the private conversations and system messages as a private note until it was last resolved. 




Note: In case the transcript does not appear in Freshdesk, please Delete & Regenerate your API key in Freshchat and update the newly generated API key in Advanced Automation settings. To know how to regenerate API Token, Click here.


How to integrate Freshdesk in Advanced Automation

Go to Advanced Automations > Settings > Freshdesk



Now add your Freshdesk Domain and Freshdesk token, and then click Verify.


To know more about Freshdesk Token, Click here.


You can find your Domain name from the Freshdesk URL. For example, in https://Acme.freshdesk.com, ‘Acme’ is the Domain name.





Note: Freshdesk is available as an integration out of the box in the Advanced Automations app. However, you can still use the same app to integrate with other Freshworks products (or other products too) by using custom placeholders to store your domain and tokens. 

Learn more about custom placeholders here.


Automation Logs

All your events in Advanced Automations will be logged. You can find this in the Logs section. Logs can be exported in .txt format.