You can use the Reply applet in a flow to send an automatic message back to the customer. You might want to do this to acknowledge receipt of a customer email, to send a message about opening hours if the customer contacts you when you are closed, or any number of other uses.
After sending the reply, the flow can continue on to other tasks.
Who the replies are sent from
By default, when you use the Reply applet, the message is sent on behalf of whichever address was associated with the inbound route that led to the flow that contains the applet.
You can override this default behaviour using the From field.
For example, if your environment had the following three inbound routes:
- Using the Reply applet in a flow attached to the source for the customer service email address would result in the customer receiving an email from that address.
- Using the Reply applet in a flow attached to the contact-form email address, would, by default, send the reply from that contact-form email address, which may be less desirable.
If you wanted to reply from the customer service email even in the case of the contact-form, we can set the From field in the Reply applet:
The format of the From field should match the Inbound route type you are using. That is to say:
- If you are using the Reply applet in a flow which is responding to an email inbound route, the From information should either be blank, or contain an email address.
- If you are using the Reply applet in a flow which is responding to an SMS inbound route, the From information should either be blank, or contain an SMS number.
Reply format
Although the applet itself has no formatting controls, and can only display plain text, the message it sends can be in rich text format.
You can copy and paste rich text from elsewhere into the reply applet. The formatting will be maintained, for the message, but will not display in the Reply applet itself.
As such, it is always highly recommended that you send a test message with the applet before using it to send to your customers. Make sure that the message formatting is correct and appears as you expected.
Message templates
As well as typing (or pasting) message text into the applet, you can select an existing message template for the message.
Click the Message template drop-down list and select one of your existing templates.
Note that the reply applet does not support message tags, so only use message templates that do not include them.
For example, the template selected in this example is not a good choice, because there are two message tags, one for the contact's first name, one for the agent name. These would not be replaced by the Reply applet.