Four layers, and the usual mistake is reaching for the last one first
A welcome message, a keyword rule, a scripted flow and an AI answerbot are four different tools that get sold as one feature. They solve different problems, they fail in different ways, and the right order to try them in is the order below — simplest first, because the simplest thing that works is also the thing that cannot surprise you.
Four layers
| Auto-repliesWelcome and away messages | Always right |
|---|---|
| Keyword rulesIf the message contains X, do Y | Predictable |
| Scripted flowsA menu with branches | Bounded |
| AI answerbotFree-form questions | Off by default |
The rightmost column is really a risk column. Work down it only as far as you need to.
1. Auto-replies
Two messages: a welcome, sent to somebody writing to you for the first time, and an away message, sent outside your business hours.
Business hours are explicit
Start time, end time, which days, and a timezone — defaulting to 9:00am–6:00pm, Monday to Friday, Asia/Kolkata. This is separate from the campaign send window, which governs outbound; this one governs what an inbound message gets when nobody is there.
Unglamorous, and the highest-value automation most businesses will ever turn on. Somebody messaging at 9pm gets an honest answer about when they will hear back instead of silence.
2. Keyword rules
A rule watches for something and does something. Each has an explicit priority, and they are evaluated in that order, so which rule wins is a decision you made rather than an accident of creation date.
What triggers a rule
- A keyword — matched as contains, exact, or starts-with. All three, because “price” inside a sentence and “PRICE” as a whole message are different intents.
- The first message of a conversation.
- Any message — the catch-all, useful mostly for sorting.
What a rule can do
- Reply with text, or with an approved template.
- Apply a label, so the conversation arrives already sorted.
- Set the status — open, pending or resolved.
- Nothing at all. A rule that only labels and sets status is often the most useful kind.
3. Scripted flows
A flow is a sequence of steps with options — the numbered-menu pattern, which is unfashionable and extremely reliable. Use it when the set of things a customer might want is genuinely small and known: check an order, book a call, talk to a person.
The reason to prefer a flow over an AI for these is not cost. It is that a flow cannot say something you did not write.
4. The AI answerbot
For the questions a menu cannot anticipate. You give it context about your business and a tone, and it answers from that.
It is off until you turn it on
Deliberately. Enabling it means writing the business context it answers from, which is the work that decides whether it is useful or embarrassing. A product that switches this on by default is making a decision about your customers that is not its to make.
What it is not
It is not a salesperson and it does not close. Treat it as the thing that keeps a conversation warm at 11pm until somebody real is available — and read what the AI is not allowed to do for the harder limits, including the approval gate on anything that spends money.
Handing off to a human
The most important setting on the answerbot is when it stops. Two controls:
- Handoff keywords — words that always route to a person, whatever the bot thinks it knows. "Complaint", "refund", "lawyer".
- Handoff on unknown — hand over anything it is not confident about, rather than producing a plausible sentence.
The second is the one worth turning on. The failure mode of an unsupervised sales bot is not silence; it is confidence.
Questions
- Is the AI answerbot on by default?
- No. It ships disabled, and turning it on is a deliberate act that requires you to write the business context it answers from. An AI that starts answering your customers the moment you connect a number is a product decision nobody should make on your behalf.
- What happens when the bot does not know the answer?
- You choose. It can hand the conversation to a human on anything it is unsure about, and it always hands off on keywords you nominate. A bot that guesses to avoid admitting it does not know is worse than no bot.
- Do automation rules run before or after the answerbot?
- Rules are evaluated in the priority order you set, and a rule can reply, apply a label, set a status, or do nothing but sort. The simplest layer that can handle a message should be the one that does, which is why priority is explicit rather than inferred.
- Can automation send outside business hours?
- Away messages exist precisely for that: outside the hours you set, the away reply goes instead of a normal one. Business hours default to 9:00am–6:00pm, Monday to Friday, in Asia/Kolkata, and are yours to change.