Use this guide to build two advanced Workflow setups: an automated snooze follow-up that prevents duplicate messages to inactive customers, and a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) eligibility control that lets your team opt specific conversations out of rating surveys.
If you're an advanced user of Workflows, you may have noticed that right now it's not possible to define your Workflow audience with conversation tags. When defining your audience for Workflows, you can use people tags and company tags, but not conversation tags. To work around this, we can use Conversation Data Attributes (CDAs).
Below are a couple of examples of how you can leverage CDAs to solve for some specific use cases.
Note: Both setups in this guide require access to the Workflows builder and permission to create Conversation Data Attributes in Settings > Data > Conversation Data.
To create a Conversation Data Attribute, just head to your Settings > Data > Conversation Data > + Create attribute. This article will walk you through how to create and leverage CDAs.
How to build an advanced automated snooze Workflow
If your team leverages Intercom for live chat and have short response times, you likely want to automate follow-ups with a short timeframe (less than 30 min) to match the teammate experience.
In that case, the Intercom template "Follow up with inactive customers", which follows up after 3 days, may not be what you're looking for. We still recommend a longer wait time as best practice, but we understand that such a timeframe won't suit every business.
Note: Even if you update the timeframe of "Customer has been unresponsive" to 30 minutes in the trigger settings, you risk sending the same follow-up message multiple times in a single conversation. There's currently no way to limit the number of times a Workflow can trigger for one conversation — which is why the steps below use a CDA to prevent duplicate follow-ups.
For this reason, you may want to create a Conversation Data Attribute such as "Auto follow-up sent" to track when an automated follow-up has been sent to avoid spamming your customers. You can create your own custom Conversation Data Attribute from Settings > Data > Conversation Data > + Create attribute. That's the first step.
Then in your trigger settings, you can define the audience rules to not send this automated follow-up when the "Auto follow-up sent" value is set to true. Below are some visuals of what steps to take.
Create a custom Conversation Data Attribute, such as "Auto follow-up sent". We recommend using a boolean (true/false) format.
Create a Workflow. We recommend using the template "Send a friendly reminder to inactive customers" as a baseline – be sure to remove the conversation tags and edit the wording to match your brand!
Here's an example of what your final workflow may look like:
Add action to "Set Auto follow-up sent to True".
Add/update action to snooze the conversation for your desired timeframe.
From the workflow trigger settings, define the audience to target people with an unknown or false value for "Auto follow-up sent". This will opt out any conversation that has sent the automated follow-up recently.
Another audience rule to consider: "Conversation state is not open". Open conversations are typically still being worked on by teammates, so excluding them means only snoozed and closed conversations will be eligible for this Workflow.
Create a separate new Workflow that resets the "Auto follow-up sent" value after a couple of days.
Tip: If a customer replies after the first automated follow-up, the Workflow stops and the "Auto follow-up sent" value stays true indefinitely. Create a separate reset Workflow to clear the value after 2 days.
You can also take your workflow to the next level by ensuring automated follow-ups are only sent during office hours. All you would need to do is create a new custom team office hours for weekdays – give it a name such as "Weekday office hours –24hr"
And then have your Workflow check if it's a weekday before automatically following up.
Set your Workflow live to start sending automated follow-ups to inactive customers.
How to control CSAT eligibility
If you'd like to opt customers out of receiving a conversation rating survey, you can create a custom Conversation Data Attribute, such as "CSAT eligibility", and use that data point to target your CSAT workflow.
This will allow teammates to mark conversations from the Help Desk as ineligible to receive a rating survey.
You can also set the Conversation Data Attribute value with macros as well!
Once you've added the CSAT eligibility rule to your Workflow's audience settings, save and publish both Workflows to put them into effect.
Need more help? Get support from our Community Forum
Find answers and get help from Intercom Support and Community Experts