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Understand business rules

Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 2 MIN
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Business rules can help you manage common automations and improve your team's processes by automatically performing actions when conversations are created or updated. Business rules allow you to trigger changes based on Company, Customer, Conversation, and Message attributes.

With business rules, you can:

  • Add or remove tags from a conversation.
  • Assign conversations to specific users or teams.
  • Remove assigned users from a conversation.
  • Update customer attributes based on conversation attributes.
  • Change the priority of a conversation.
Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access the Business rules page.


In this article:

Overview

Business rules are simple and perfect for small changes and updates you want to make and manage in real-time. They are designed for the more common automations you might want to create and manage without requiring developers. Business rules allow you to change attributes on objects like conversations and customers. You can use these rules to create simple automations for conversation assignments, such as adding tags and changing priorities.

Important business rule facts:

  • Business rules are created from conditions and actions. Conditions set the criteria needed for the action to fire and actions represent what will be performed when those criteria are met.
  • Business rules will run immediately after conversations are created or updated and workflows have finished. 
  • Business rules will only fire, or apply their actions, if the conversation meets the rule's set conditions.
  • Actions applied by one rule can affect other rules.
  • Actions in one rule can affect the conditions in another.
  • Business rules do not run or fire on conversations after they are done. However, rules can fire while a conversation is being set to done.

Kustomer also comes with a workflow feature that is frequently used along with business rules. Workflows are a more advanced automation feature that allows you to automate processes or add custom business logic to take full advantage of the Kustomer platform. Workflows allow you to create automations triggered when events occur in Kustomer or any connected app, then use conditional branching to add tags, assign users, create customers, or even make calls to external systems. In contrast to business rules, configuring workflows usually requires assistance from your implementation team or developer administrators. For more information, see Workflows overview.

When do business rules run?

The great thing about both of these tools is that they work together. Conversations in Kustomer will always run workflows first, so you can create integrations and update anything. Once your workflows have been completed, business rules will run using available data or changes made via workflows. New and updated conversations will start at the top of the rule list, looking for a match, and conversations that match all of the criteria defined will have those business rules applied.

Note: If you have queues & routing configured, they'll run last so that both workflows and business rules can apply changes to help you move conversations through your process. Learn more about Queue rules.

Migrate from a workflow

You may find that you have a few workflows that already exist and can be moved over to business rules. We recommend that you create the new business rule first, activate it, and then turn off the workflow. Do not delete the workflow just yet. Ensure the business rule and its order work the way you expect before deleting the workflow.