Workflow Conditions and Actions
Workflows are composed of conditions (what you’re looking for) and actions (what you want to happen). This article lists all available conditions and actions.
Workflow conditions
| Condition | Description |
| Customer Name | Contains, does not contain, is or is not equal to, starts with, ends with, or matches a regex pattern for the Customer Name field |
| Customer Email | Contains, does not contain, is or is not equal to, starts with, ends with a specific email address, or matches a regex pattern for the Customer Email field |
| Help Scout User | Look for conversations where a specific User replied or added a note |
| Type | Is equal to or not equal to email, chat, or phone |
| Status | Is equal to or not equal to Active, Pending, Closed, or Spam |
| Assigned | Is equal to or not equal to a specific Help Scout assignee, or unassigned |
| To | Contains, does not contain, is or is not equal to, starts or ends with, or matches a regex pattern in the To: field, for an email address that is not the Inbox address |
| Cc | Contains, does not contain, is or is not equal to, starts or ends with, or matches a regex pattern in the Cc: field |
| Subject | Contains, does not contain, is or is not equal to, starts or ends with, or matches a regex pattern in the Subject field |
| Body | Customer message or User note contains specific words or phrases within the body |
| Attachment(s) | Does or does not include an attachment |
| Tag(s) | Is, Is not, or matches a regex pattern |
| Rating | Satisfaction rating is equal to Great, Okay, or Not Good |
| Rating Comments | Satisfaction rating does or does not include comments |
| Snooze | Conversation is or is not snoozed |
| Date Created | In the last or is not in the last X days or hours |
| Waiting Since | Longer or not longer than X days or hours |
| Last User Reply | In the last or not in the last X days or hours |
| Last Customer Reply | In the last or not in the last X days or hours |
| Exact Date Created | Before or after a specific calendar date |
| Custom Field | Look for conversations that include or exclude Custom Field values (requires Custom Fields) |
| Customer Property | Look for conversations that include or exclude a Customer Property (requires a Plus or Pro plan) |
Workflow Operators
These are the operators you will find along with text search based conditions.
| Operator | Description |
| Is equal to | The field matches the text entered exactly, including spaces and special characters |
| Contains | The field contains the words in an exact match or in the prefix of the field |
| Does not contain | The field does not contain the words in the prefix of the field Note: Using OR with Does not contain creates a double negative and will not give any results. Use AND with Does not contain instead |
| Is not equal to | The field does not match text entered exactly, including spaces and special characters |
| Starts with | The field starts with the words entered exactly |
| Ends with | The field ends with the words entered exactly without partial matching |
| Matches regex pattern | Use a regular expression to create your own operator |
Tips for success
You should use whole words as your terms and define multiple conditions or Workflows to account for all variations that you want to find, rather than using single conditions looking for partial matches. This will prevent matching on any word that includes end, like friend, send, weekend, trend, etc.
Note: Workflows only run one time on any given conversation, even if it still matches the criteria later, to avoid loops. The one exception to this is the AI Draft generation action when set to run on all threads, as that will apply to any customer email that is in a conversation that matches, even if it it has run on that conversation before.
Workflow actions
| Action | Description |
| Send an Email | Notify a Help Scout User or send a custom email to the customer |
| Generate an AI Draft | Automatically start a draft to the first customer email or every customer email in a matching conversation using AI Drafts. AI Drafts must be enabled and have usage left for this action to work. See AI Drafts Pricing and Billing for more help there. |
| Forward | Forward conversation with a custom message to a third party |
| Add a Note | Add a private note to a conversation |
| Change Status | Change the status to Active, Pending, Closed, or Spam |
| Assign to User | Assign a conversation to a specific Help Scout User |
| Assign to Team | Assign a conversation to a specific Help Scout Team (requires Teams) |
| Add Tag(s) | Add one or more tags to a conversation |
| Remove Tag(s) | Remove one or more tags from a conversation |
| Move to Inbox | Move conversations to another Inbox |
| Delete | Delete the conversation Note: Conversations deleted by a Workflow will not appear in Recently Deleted and are not recoverable |
| Set Custom Field | Set a Custom Field (requires Custom Fields) |