Community Send Auto-reply Action

The Send auto-reply action element for Community Flow Automations sends automated replies using Account answer templates. The same limitations as described in Reply Options and Limitations in Community Messages apply.

Auto-reply is unable to reply to mentions and listening content.

You can only choose from profiles that you have the Community publish permission for. To learn more, see Profile Roles.

If the person who created the flow later loses permission to the profile, the flow becomes view-only to that user. However, the flow does not become inactive if already active.

You can also select an optional fallback template in case dynamic data in the template is unavailable.

• Reply as
  If it isn’t possible to send the auto-reply as a selected message type, the auto-reply won’t be sent:

  • Direct message

  • Comment

• Answer template
  Select one of your account’s answer templates. When selecting a template, consider the following:

  • These are the templates that you created in Settings -> Answer templates -> Account answer templates. For more information, see Set Up Answer Templates for Community.

  • If the answer template contains dynamic data, the message won't be sent if the dynamic data is not available at the time of sending. You can choose an optional fallback.

  • For Community, if there are many assigned users, the {{agent_name}} dynamic placeholder uses the name of the first assigned user.

  • If the answer template has a Voice of Customer survey attached, the survey is also sent.

Action-result conditions

After the Send auto-reply action runs, the flow can branch based on whether the reply was sent successfully or not. To route your flow based on the outcome, add an Action-result condition node directly below the Send auto-reply action.

You can build a flow for a single scenario or create branches for both outcomes:

• Success — The reply was published successfully. Use this branch to continue with follow-up actions, such as labeling the content or updating the message status.

• Error — The reply could not be sent. Use this branch to define a recovery path, such as retrying the action or routing to an alternative action.

Tip: You can combine the Success branch with a label-based check to prevent sending duplicate replies. See Limit auto-reply to 1 reply below.

Limit auto-reply to 1 reply

Depending on your flow, a customer could theoretically meet the conditions to receive a reply more than once. You can circumvent this problem by building your flow in a way that prevents the flow from sending another reply.

Use labels and conditions

Create a label that you will use to identify cases that have received an auto reply. For example, reply-sent.

Before the auto-reply action, add a condition that checks to see if the message has the reply-sent label. After the auto-reply action, add an action that sets the reply-sent label.

Now, if a message already has the label you specified, an auto-reply will not be sent to that message.

If auto-reply shouldn’t be disabled indefinitely, consider adding additional actions to remove the label once specific conditions are met.