When an email comes into your FuseDesk account, if it’s not part of an existing case and it’s not a generic auto-response, you have the option of running the email through Automations that you create to decide how to handle the email.

If you’re an Administrator for your account, click on over to Automations under Settings and get started on creating your first Automation! We’ve put in a few sample automations for you (disabled of course!) so you can get an idea of what an Automation looks like.

Every Automation can have multiple conditions and multiple actions.

For your conditions, you can search fields in the email such as to, from, the subject and the body. This is a simple, quick, and easy text search of the field specified. All specified conditions are required, meaning that if any one of them isn’t true, the Automation won’t be processed.

For your actions, you have a number of choices, in the following specific order.

Ignoring Emails

You can choose to ignore an email or mark it as spam. If you choose either option, no other  actions can take place.

Assignment

You can now assign emails automatically to a specific person in a department or to ANY rep in a given department. If you choose Any Rep, we’ll randomly pick a rep in the department and assign the case on over to them.

If you have multiple Automations that are processed on a given email that include assignment actions, only the last assignment specified is the assignment action will be followed.

After a case is assigned, you’ll see in the case transfer note which Automation caused the transfer.

Automation (Email Templates and Action Sets)

After you create a case, if a contact is found – and only if a matching contact is found by email address – you have the option to automatically reply with a template or run an action set. If no matching contact is found, emails will not be sent and action sets will not run.

Be careful that you don’t overuse automatic replies with email templates for two important reasons. One is that if the template isn’t truly resolving the customers issue, they’ll get more frustrated with a “brush off” automatic reply, and secondly, if you aren’t resolving the issue, your stats will be skewed with very low First Response times, even though you weren’t truly responding.

You can use an action set (Action Sets are setup in Infusionsoft) to apply or remove tags from a contact, add them to a follow up sequence, create an opportunity, and so much more. For example, if a customer uses a certain keyword in their email, you may want to tag them in Infusionsoft!

Close the Case

You can optionally close a case after it’s been opened if you’re confident that your automation has resolved the issue.

Continue Processing Automations

By default, once an Automation matches, we run the actions and stop processing Automations. If you’d prefer to structure your automations such that they chain together and multiple automations can be applied to an incoming email, add the action to Continue Processing Automations and we’ll do so until we run out of Automations to check or we find a matching Automation that does not specify we should continue processing Automations.

You can turn an Automation on and off by clicking on the On/Off button in the top left. All new Automations are Off by default until you turn them on.

You can change the name of the Automation by clicking on it’s name and updating the name.

Click on the green button to Add New automations, conditions and actions.

Click on the red delete button to remove Automations, conditions and actions.

Click and drag the draggable handle to rearrange Automations, conditions and actions.