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Automations

With Automations, things that used to depend on someone remembering happen by themselves: a call ends and the caller gets a satisfaction survey, a chat closes and feedback is collected, a bad score opens a ticket for your recovery team — each after exactly the delay you choose.

TL;DR

• What it is: Rules of the form "when something happens → only if conditions match → wait → then act": send surveys or messages, open tickets, assign chats, add labels, set reminders, notify your team.
• Who it's for: Admins and owners (automations act on your customers unattended, so setting them up is an admin decision).
• Top outcome: Follow-ups that never get forgotten — with a run log that shows exactly what happened, and what deliberately didn't.

At a glance

How to get there

Sidebar › Settings › Workflows › Automations

Direct URL: app.lodgestory.com/crm/settings/automations

What is Automations?

Every automation has the same shape:

1. When — the moment that starts it: a call completed or missed, a chat resolved or reopened, a workflow attached or moved to a stage, a ticket created/resolved/assigned, a survey response submitted, a customer message with no reply, a channel disconnecting, a template's approval changing — or a daily/weekly schedule for internal digests.
2. Only if — conditions on that moment: inbound calls with more than 30 seconds of talk time, survey score in the detractor band, chat has the VIP label.
3. Wait — minutes, hours or days. Waits can shift to your business hours, so a survey for a 11:50 pm call goes out next morning, not at midnight.
4. Then — one or more actions, each with its own optional condition that is re-checked right before it runs. That re-check is what makes "send a survey 30 minutes after a chat closes — but only if it's still closed" actually mean what it says.

Each time the trigger fires for someone, that's a run. Runs are listed with a full step-by-step timeline: what ran, what was skipped and why, what was suppressed by a protective cap, what failed.

Start from a recipe

The fastest way in is a recipe — a prebuilt automation with safe defaults already set. Pick one, fill in the blanks it can't know (which survey form, which team), publish, switch it on:

• Post-call CSAT — answered inbound call → 5 min → survey
• Post-chat CSAT — chat resolved → 30 min → survey (cancels itself if the chat reopens)
• Post-ticket CSAT — ticket resolved → 1 h → survey
• Post-workflow CSAT — workflow reaches its final stage → 30 min → survey
• Detractor recovery ticket — low score → high-priority ticket to your recovery pool + team alert, instantly
• Escalate a floor score — rock-bottom scores alert leadership directly
• Promoter review request — happy scores (and only happy scores) get a review link
• Missed-call catch — missed call → 2 min → "sorry we missed you" + a callback reminder for the agent
• Survey abandonment nudge — survey unanswered after 24 h → one gentle reminder
• No-reply escalation ladder — customer waiting 5 min → nudge the assignee; 15 min → hand the chat to a different available agent
• Unowned workflow catch — workflow chat unassigned after 10 min → assign from a team
• Channel disconnected alert — a channel drops → every admin is alerted immediately

Before your first customer-facing automation

Two one-time settings under Automations › Settings:

• Act as (service account): the account automated messages are sent as — the name your customers see. You pick it explicitly from your workspace's service accounts; an automation that messages customers cannot be switched on until you have. Create service accounts under Team Members.
• Protective caps: at most N automated messages per customer per day (across ALL automations — three individually sensible rules reaching one customer in an hour is spam), and a per-automation hourly ceiling that pauses a runaway rule and alerts every admin.

There is also a suppression list: anyone on it never receives automated messages, whatever any rule says.

Guardrails you get without asking

• No 3 am messages — waits can shift into business hours (and quiet-hours releases are spread out, not blasted at 9:00:00). Quiet hours hold back messages to customers, not internal work: a late-night missed call still raises its ticket and pings the team straight away.
• No double-sends — each occurrence enrols exactly once, even if the same event is reported twice. You choose the re-enrolment policy: once per interaction, once per customer (with a cooldown), or every occurrence.
• No loops — an automation's own actions never trigger other automations by default, and hard depth limits back that up.
• No surveying the same customer repeatedly — survey sends inherit your workspace's survey-fatigue caps automatically.
• WhatsApp's 24-hour rule handled — outside the customer-care window an automation only sends approved templates; the editor tells you when a template is needed.
• Missing details fail safe — a message that references the customer's name can carry a fallback ("there"); a required detail that's missing stops the send rather than sending "Hi ,".
• Nothing silently stops — a rule that pauses itself (too many runs, repeated failures) notifies every admin, and every run explains itself in the run log.

Test before you trust

Every automation has a Test panel: point it at a real record (a recent call, chat, ticket or survey response) and it shows whether the rule would fire, which conditions pass or fail, and exactly what every message would say — without sending anything or creating anything.

The score behind score-based automations

Score-triggered rules ("if the score is low…") read each response's primary score — the one question that IS the score of the form (set in the survey form's settings; automatic otherwise). Scores also carry a sentiment band — detractor, passive, promoter — so "detractor → recovery ticket" works the same whether the form uses 1–5 stars, NPS or thumbs.

Limits

• Active automations and runs per month are plan limits; usage shows at the top of the Automations page.
• One automation can have up to 20 steps and 30 days of total waiting.
• Scheduled automations (daily/weekly) are for internal digests and alerts — they can't message customers. Audience sends belong in Campaigns.

FAQ

Why didn't my automation send anything?
Open the run: the timeline states the reason — a condition failed (with the exact field), the chat reopened, the customer is on the suppression list, the daily cap was reached, or the survey-fatigue cap suppressed the invite. "Deliberately didn't" and "broke" are always distinguishable.

What happens to runs that are mid-wait when I edit the automation?
They finish on the version they started on. New enrolments use the new version.

What happens when I switch an automation off? New enrolments stop immediately. Runs already mid-wait finish on their published version — cancel any of them from the Runs view if they shouldn't.

Can an automation reply to every incoming message?
No — instant replies are what Bot Journeys are for. An automation triggered by an incoming message must wait at least a minute before any customer-facing send.