Creating Advanced Rules

Rules are a powerful way to automate your team's workflow. They let you reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks and increase the precision of processes. Computers don't make mistakes, right?

In Missive, you can create incoming/outgoing rules on all types of messages (emails, SMS, tweets, Facebook messages, WhatsApp, and Missive Live Chat). They can also be triggered by user actions, such as adding a new label, posting a comment, or closing a conversation.

We have explored Rules and examples in the past, but they've always been simple, straightforward ones. In this blog post, we want to show you the power of Rules by creating advanced subgroups of nested conditions.

Conditions Icon Nomenclature

We are going to be exploring three examples.

1. Incoming messages

A logistics company has hired a new routing associate. She is not yet used to the company's internal acronyms or the SLA (Service-level agreement) for different customers and drivers.

So, her manager will set up a rule that triggers when:

• The message is sent to routing@company.com or the new employee is the assignee.
• At least one abbreviation is present.
• The label Driver is present.
• The email has been sitting for more than 5 minutes in her inbox.

The rule will:

• Show a message with the most common acronyms of the company.
• Display a message saying she has 15 minutes to answer the email.

The setup in Missive looks like this:

These are the actions triggered by the conditions:

2. Outgoing messages

A project manager needs to keep all sent invoices organized for her Project Beta. She has two customers. It should be a relatively simple task, but the problem is that her customer, Acme.com, is pretty big, so her point of contact changes often. The other customer, Company.com, has established 2 points of contact and both contacts need to receive the invoice. She also needs to make sure the payments are made.

This project manager will set a rule that triggers on outgoing emails when either:

• The recipient has an acme.com address
• The recipients are lisa@company.com and arthur@company.com
• There's an invoice attachment that's a PDF or an XLS file.

The rule will:

• Apply the label Project Beta Invoices.
• Will set the conversation color to yellow.
• Will snooze the conversation for 15 days, to remind the Finance Team to collect payment. Unless they respond to her email with the payment first.

The setup in Missive looks like this:

These are the actions triggered by the conditions:

User actions

A sales employee wants to keep track of her to-dos in a single place, and she wants to have a more clutter-free inbox. She wants a straightforward action to get this done several times per day.

The sales employee will create a rule that triggers when:

• She creates a task.
• Text of the task ends with the action-code #td designated by her.
• Only if she's assigned to the conversation or she initiates the action.

The rule will:

• Apply the To-do label
• Remove the conversation from her inbox

The setup in Missive looks like this:

These are the actions triggered by the conditions:

We hope advanced rules can make your life a bit easier, just like they have done it for us.

Soon we will be creating a page with rule templates that you can copy and implement in your workflow. Stay tuned!