How to Set Up Case Auto-Response Rules

Isn’t it true that each of us have interacted with different businesses as a consumer at some point? As paying customers, we want to get the most value out of our purchases – seeking not only quality products but also exceptional customer service. Quick response times to our queries is definitely a major indicator of outstanding support.

Businesses can truly shine by demonstrating their responsiveness. With Case Auto-Response Rules, Salesforce offers businesses a chance to take their customer service up a notch by enabling automated responses based on predefined criteria. In this guide, let’s walk through setting them up. 

The Scenario

Let’s illustrate a simple scenario so it’s easier to understand why we’re doing each step.

Lana is the owner of a small business: an online pet shop called “Pets in the City”. She’s a one-woman team who takes pride in offering personalized customer service to furparents. But as her business grows, she finds it more and more difficult to respond promptly to every customer inquiry while managing inventory and completing orders.

She decides to set up an auto-response rule for inquiries about product availability.

Requirements

Before setting up your auto-response rule, you must have or decide on two things: the criteria and the email template.

Decide on Criteria

This is important because it determines what would trigger the auto-response.

For this scenario, Lana decides that if the case subject contains keywords like “availability,” “stock,” or “inventory”, an auto-response must be sent.

Write the Email Template

Once you’ve defined the criteria for triggering the auto-response, prepare the email template that will be sent out automatically.

• Login to Salesforce and go to the App Launcher (9-dot grid on the upper left). 
• Search for and open “Email Templates”. 
• Hit “New Email Template” and give it a name. 
• For the Related Entity Type, select Case. This means that the email template can only be chosen when the email being composed has a corresponding “Related To” record (in this scenario, it’s a case record). 

• Select the folder where you want this email template to be saved.
• Craft the subject and email content. From here you can do some basic formatting as well as inserting merge fields. The merge field button is on the lower right (it’s very small and isn’t part of the main formatting row!)

• Hit Save.

Setting Up the Rule

We’re now ready to create the auto-response rule! Pretending we’re in Lana’s shoes, let’s:

• Go to Setup.
• In the Quick Find box, type “case auto” and go into the “Case Auto-Response Rules” result.
• Click “New” and set a name for the rule. Here you can also see the Active checkbox, so you can decide whether to already set it as the active rule or not. Take note that only one rule can be active for cases at a given time – activating your new rule will automatically deactivate your org’s current case auto-response rule, if it exists.

• Hit Save.
• The screen will automatically take you to the list of Case Auto-Response Rules. Click the name of your new rule.
• Under Rule Entries, hit New.
• Enter the Sort Order. This determines the order in which Salesforce will evaluate this rule entry. The system evaluates in order, so as soon as criteria are met, the record is processed and the following rule entries will no longer be evaluated.
• Begin defining rule criteria. You can decide whether to define criteria in dropdown boxes and logic operators, or write a formula. For this simple example, we’re sticking with the dropdown boxes.

• By default, the logic operators are set to AND. Just click “Add Filter Logic” to change or group them. As seen above, I’ve set them to OR.
• Specify the Name and Email Address that will appear on the “From” line when the message is received by the customer. 
• For the email template, click the magnifying glass icon to search the name of the email template created earlier. 
• Tick the “Send response to all recipients” checkbox if you would like the auto-response to be sent to all the addresses (aside from the sender) on the To and Cc line.

• Hit Save!

Test, Test, Test!

Testing is almost always the most exciting part of setting up new functionality in Salesforce. I have Email-to-Case set up in my org, so I tested the auto-response rule by intentionally sending an email inquiry that I expect to trigger my rule. See that my subject has the word “stock” which is one of the words in our criteria.

Sending this email has created a new case in my org with the same subject. Upon checking my personal inbox, I have received an email:

The response also appeared on the case record’s feed:

Looks like the auto-response rule worked!

Summary

And that’s it! You’ve just set up your own Case Auto-Response Rule. The scenario used in this guide was pretty basic, but you can set additional criteria or longer email templates depending on your business need. Customers are going to love the lightning-fast responses, and your support team will thank you for the time saved.