Use business rules

Business rules can automate actions in conversations to increase your team's efficiency. This article will walk you through an example of a basic business rule that will automatically close a conversation based on a given criteria. A use case for this might be if your team wishes to capture inbound tweets but did not need to respond to them as part of a conversation.

In this article

• Prerequisites
• Create the business rule
• Configure the business rule trigger and conditions
• Set actions for the business rule

Prerequisites

Before following this guide, you should decide and set up the criteria you want to filter. For example, if you plan to filter conversations originating from Facebook, you'll need to configure the Instagram channel in Apps > Instagram.

We also recommend that you already be comfortable with the basics of using business rules.

Create the business rule

In this example rule, our goal is to filter inbound messages from Facebook comments and automatically close conversations originating from this channel. You can also adapt these steps to create any other rule that suits your needs.

The first step will be to create a new business rule:

1. Go to Settings > Platform > Business Rules.
2. Select Add Rule.

Configure the business rule trigger and conditions

This brings up a preference pane labeled Edit Business Rule where the rule can be adjusted. Next, we'll set up this rule to adjust the trigger and criteria that cause the rule to fire. In this example rule, our goal will be to filter inbound messages from Instagram comments and automatically close conversations from this channel.

To edit the business rule:

1. Fill out the Name and Description of this rule. We always recommend that you use clear and illustrative names and descriptions as a best practice so that it's easy to know what function this rule performs if another member of your team reviews this rule at a later date. For this example, we can use:
   • Name: Automatically close Instagram messages
   • Description: Business rule that automatically closes incoming comments from the Instagram channel 
2. Under Set Trigger, use the menu to select what triggers the business rule. In this example, we'll use Conversation Updated: First Inbound Interaction so that the rule doesn't fire every time the customer replies.
   
3. Use the Conditions settings to control the criteria this trigger looks out for. In this example, we'll use the Conversation - Channel - Is Equal To - Instagram comment condition to filter on inbound messages that originate as a public Instagram comment, which excludes private Instagram DMs.
   

Set actions for the business rule

The final section in the Edit Business Rule settings is where you'll configure what action(s) this rule performs when activated. Our example rule will change the conversation status created from an inbound tweet to Done.

To set the actions for the business rule:

1. Under Set Actions, use the Select Action Type menu to choose Update Data.
2. Select Add Action.
3. In the Type menu, select Conversation.
4. In the Field menu, select Status.
5. In the Operation menu, select Replace With.
6. Use the Select a value menu to select Done.
   

The finished rule can now be saved, and you can activate the business rule whenever you wish for it to take effect.