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Auto-replies
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Auto-replies

[Note]Note

This feature is NOT available on Akeeba Ticket System Core. Even though you can set auto-replies they have no effect.

You will often want to send an automatic reply to your users without human interaction. Some practical examples (non-inclusive list!):

  • Thanking a user for filing a ticket and letting them know that a human agent will reply to them shortly, or inform them about any holidays / vacation time which may adversely effect the response time.

  • Send a notification to a user after a certain amount of time since your support staff last replied to them (an automatic follow up post)

  • Remind the user to attach a file if they forgot to do so; practical cases are when log files / screenshots are needed for software support or if you are running something like a digital print agency which requires the user to upload their artwork.

  • Send an automatic reply to most frequently asked questions, based on keywords in the title or body of the ticket.

  • Send an warning to users who have sent too many posts in a ticket, informing them that every time they post on their ticket they end up at the bottom of the reply queue.

This feature consists of three parts:

  1. The automatic reply rules. This is what you define in this page. It determines the conditions for sending an automatic reply and the content of the reply.

  2. The automatic reply bot usernames. This is defined in the component's Options, under CLI Automation. Please refer to the Options documentation for more information.

  3. A CLI script which must be manually scheduled by you, using CRON, to run the rules and send the replies. Please refer to the CRON scripts documentation for more information.

[Warning]Warning

If you do not create a CRON script for this feature no automatic reply will ever be sent!

Each auto-reply rule has the following settings:

Title

The title of this auto reply rule. This is only visible to you.

Categories

Which ticket categories this rule applies to. Select the first option ("- Select a category") to apply the rule to all categories.

Manager reply

Apply this auto-reply rule depending on whether a human member of the support staff has already posted a reply to this ticket:

  • If not replied. Only send the auto-reply if a human member of the support staff has not posted yet to this ticket.

  • If already replied. Only send the auto-reply if a human member of the support staff has already posted to this ticket.

  • Always. It doesn't matter if a human member of the support staff has already posted to this ticket or not, send the auto-reply anyway.

No of posts

The minimum number of total posts in the ticket before this rule is triggered. Leave empty or set to 0 to send the auto-reply irrespective of the number of total posts on the ticket.

Min. after

How many minutes must elapse after the ticket was first filed before sending this auto-reply. Set to 0 to ignore this option.

Run if the attachment

Apply this auto-reply rule depending on the existence of an attachment in any of the posts in this ticket:

  • is not present. Send this auto-reply only if there are no attachments in any of the posts in this ticket.

  • is present. Send this auto-reply only if there are attachments in any of the posts in this ticket.

  • always. Send this auto-reply without caring about the existence of attachments.

Status

Set to Unpublished to disable the rule without deleting it.

Ticket title

Enter a list of keywords or phrases which must be present in the ticket title for this auto-reply to be sent. Type one keyword or phrase per line.

Ticket text

Enter a list of keywords or phrases which must be present in the ticket body (the posts of the user) for this auto-reply to be sent. Type one keyword or phrase per line.

Bot reply

Enter the automatic reply to be sent when this rule matches the ticket.

Please note that there are some important quirks regarding the operation of this feature that you should be aware of:

  • Only Open tickets are taken into account. If the ticket is in any other status it will be ignored.

  • Only one auto-reply will ever be sent per ticket.

  • The ordering of the rules matters. The first rule to match the ticket will send an auto-reply. All other rules will be ignored for that ticket.

  • If a user is a manager in Category A and posts to Category B where he is not a manager the "Manager reply" option will consider him as a manager anyway. This means that auto-replies will never be sent to tickets owned by managers of ANY category on your site if the "Manager reply" option is set to "If not replied". Granted, this is a very rare case, but you should be aware that this is by design and not a bug.

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