AMA 1/25 Recap: Automations, 3rd party WhatsApp integrations, and Identifying Inbound Auto-responses

  • 26 January 2023
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Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s Community AMA!

 

This event featured a lot of excellent questions and group discussion, as our facilitators @bryce.coleman and myself addressed obstacles from several individuals and teams, and touched on a range of solutions for each. Below is a recap of the conversation we had. 

 

Automating Data Collection For New Inbound Conversations

The first segment of the AMA focused on best practices for grouping new conversations by targeting available data. In addition to looking for keywords in the subject line, message body, or the sender’s email itself, the chat channel was recommended as a useful method of obtaining additional information, through passive collection (like reporting the webpage from which chat was accessed), and active collection (such as asking questions with tools like the Conversational Assistant).

 

This topic was readdressed in another discussion about identifying inbound customer texts by timezone. A solution for this was suggested that would utilize a Workflow to check the sender’s area code, and update the conversation accordingly.

 

Automations That Trigger On An Unwanted Event

Two automations were discussed in which messages were being auto-sent sent at incorrect times. One was a Business Rule that was built to detect key words or phrases, and the other was a Workflow that was designed to run at certain times of day. In both cases, customers were receiving more messages than intended. The suggested solution in both cases was to narrow the direction-type on the trigger to “Initial-In”.

 

For more on the difference between the “Direction” and “Direction-Type” attributes, check out this help article!

 

3rd-Party WhatsApp Integrations VS The New Native WhatsApp Channel

A debate was held on the pros and cons of using 3rd-party Whatsapp integrations like MessageBird, or switching over to the new 1st-party integration. While the answer may ultimately vary on a case-by-case basis, the suggestion in this case was to switch to the 1st-party integration, as 3rd-party integrations tend to be clunkier, and often provide less insight.

 

Identifying And Ignoring Inbound Auto-Responses

A question was raised around how to automate and disregard inbound auto-response messages, such as automated thank yous and out-of-office notifications. While there may be no fool-proof way to detect these types of messages, suggestions from the group included using Business Rules, Workflows, Conversational Assistant, or a mix of all three to detect key-words, and/or identify messages received in immediate proximity to to the most recently sent outbound message.

 

 

If you have follow up questions from the AMA, feel free to post them here! If you didn’t have a chance to make this week’s AMA — feel free to sign up for the next one on our Events page! We’ll be hosting these twice a month going forward. 


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Thanks, Erin and Bryce for all your help. 

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I learned a ton on the AMA, I appreciate you both leading this discussion.

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@Alexandra Badel 👋 You can tag in Bryce and Erinn here!

Oh man -- I came to the forum to look for support on how to Identify And Ignore Inbound Auto-Responses. is there any best practice or documentation that further explores how I could set this up?

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Hey @erinm 👋 Welcome to the community! Thanks for taking the time to sign up and ask your question here.

I’m going to tag @bryce.coleman @erinn, they facilitated the original conversation and might be able to help you out here.

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Hi @erinm ! We don’t have any formal documentation but we do use a regex step in a workflow to identify key words in the message subject or the body of the email to identify it as an auto response.It’s not perfect but it does catch a lot of auto replies. Here’s a screenshot of how it works to identify key words: 

Here’s a link to take a look and copy that regex for use in a workflow.

 

If building out a workflow isn’t in your wheel house, you can always add key words and phrases to a business rule.

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