After a customer sends their first message, you can create inbound Workflows that can monitor a broad range of channels, increasing the coverage of your automations in order to deflect, triage and route new inbound conversations more efficiently, while providing your customers with support in the channels they use day-to-day.
Messages received in reply to outbound content will match-to and action Workflows that use a 'Customer sends their first message' trigger.
Get started
Go to Automation > Workflows and click New workflow.
Choose Create from scratch and use the trigger "Customer sends their first message".
Set up trigger rules
Channels allow you to select exactly which inbound channels you would like this trigger to apply to. These omnichannel Workflows allow you to configure channel-specific actions and content.
When your customers send you a message on these channels, this Workflow will trigger if they meet the criteria you specify in the Audience section.
Note: After triggering a 'Customer sends their first message' Workflow that contains customer-facing elements, a delay of >2 mins is required between successive emails sent by a single end-user which start new Conversations for the same Workflow to be triggered again. Gaps of <2 mins will result in the Workflow not triggering.
Sending Workflows in different languages
There is a Detected Language attribute in Audience rules that allows you to target customers by their language.
The value of this attribute is defined as follows:
The ML-detected language from the first user message in the conversation.
If no language is detected from the first customer message, the user's current Messenger locale.
If there is no Messenger locale for the user, the workspace’s locale.
This is exactly the same logic that our Workflows use to determine the language of the conversation, for instance, for Task bots to know what language to speak in, or for omnichannel Workflows to send text fallbacks for quick replies or attribute collectors in external channels.
We recommend creating a Workflow for each language you want to serve your content in. You can then target each Workflow to its desired audience with the Detected Language attribute.
Once you've finished setting up the trigger rules and scheduling, you can click Save and close.
Add content
Now you can start building your Workflow on the visual canvas.
Using Reusable workflows
Reusable workflows can be used with this inbound trigger to help you manage your Workflows more efficiently.
Simply select Pass to reusable workflow from a path using the + icon. You’ll see a list of reusable Workflows you’ve created. Choose one from the list or create a new Workflow you’d like to link to.
To see which Workflows have been reused, go to Automation > Workflows and expand the Reusable workflows list. This will also show you which Workflows are using them.
You will only be able to select a Reusable workflow whose content is compatible with the channels selected for the parent Workflow. See Channel Compatibility for an overview of which steps are supported across channels.
If you edit a Reusable workflow and make it incompatible with one of the parent Workflow’s target channels, we'll warn you and a pop-up will appear preventing the change from occurring. Access the Reusable workflow from the pop-up and either remove or substitute the unsupported step.
Conversations created via the API
The After a customer sends their first message trigger allows Workflows to respond to conversations that are created via the Intercom public API. The new rules predicate allows you to specifically target (or exclude) these conversations.
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