Automation & follow-ups

The follow-up sits on the ticket in the “Details” card on the right, below the deadlines. As long as none is set it says “No follow-up set.” with a “Set follow-up” button. You pick a date and time (“Date and time”) and add a note (“Note (optional)”, placeholder “Why is this coming back?”). After that the buttons read “Change” and “Remove”.

The note is where the value is. In two weeks a date alone will not tell you why this ticket is back on your desk. That is also why the note hangs on the date: remove the date and the note goes with it — a reason without a date is something nobody would ever see again.

Above the ticket list sits a “Follow-up:” row with four buttons — “No filter”, “Today”, “This week” and “Overdue” — and the list itself has a “Follow-up” column. It deliberately does not live inside the collapsed filter block: this is the question an agent starts the day with.

“Overdue” includes today’s. Otherwise a follow-up would disappear on exactly the day it counts — the moment its time of day has passed.

The rules live under “Settings → Automation”. The line below the heading says what this is about: “Rules that act when nobody else does.” A rule belongs to a team and works on that team’s tickets; the “Team” selector at the top decides which rules you are looking at.

The difference to everything else in the system: these rules do not react to an event, they react to its ABSENCE. No reply from the requester for three days, no movement for a week, created four hours ago and still nobody’s job — there is no click that triggers any of this. Which is exactly why nobody notices it.

A notice with a green tick at the top tells you that checks are running: “The automation checks every minute. 2 of 6 rule(s) are enabled.” With no rule enabled you get the warning “No rule is enabled. Nothing is being checked and tickets behave exactly as before.” — and then nothing really happens.

A rule looks at all tickets of its team, however many there are. In one pass it acts on at most 500 of them. The rest follow in the next pass.

A rule that was switched off does not catch up. When you switch it on again, it does not act on what became due during the pause. Rules without a time condition are the exception: they do catch up. The first time a rule is switched on, it acts on everything its preview shows.

A rule has three blocks. “WHEN” is the absence it reacts to (“Something has not happened for a while. This is what the automation reacts to.”). “IF” narrows down which tickets that applies to (“Which tickets it applies to.”) — by status, priority, team, category, assignee or rating. “THEN” is what happens.

Above the blocks the rule stands there as one sentence, and it rewrites itself with every change: “When a ticket has seen no activity for more than 5 minutes and has the priority “High”, then set a follow-up in 4 hours.” If something is still missing, the sentence says so in that very spot instead of hiding it.

In the “IF” block you also decide how the conditions combine: “All conditions must apply” or “Any condition is enough”. The sentence above changes its shape accordingly — with an “and” it would otherwise claim the opposite of what the rule does.

Two fields control how several rules work together: “Order” sets the sequence, and the switch “Skip the following rules for a ticket this rule applies to” stops every later rule for a ticket this one applies to.

A new rule starts with the time condition “Time without any activity” “longer than” 3 “days” in the “WHEN” block. Change or remove it if your rule needs something else.

Every installation ships with four rules: “Example: remind the requester after 3 business days”, “Example: close after 10 days without a reply”, “Example: raise the priority of unassigned tickets” and “Example: follow up on tickets nobody touched for a week”. They sit one below the other on the “Automation” page.

All four are switched off — each carries the “Off” badge and “Last run: never”. They are a starting point to read and rebuild, not behaviour somebody slipped past you. Rename them, change them, switch them on or delete them.

They also apply to “Every team” — the only place in the system where that happens without an explicit choice. So before you switch one on, check whether it really is meant for all of your teams.

Below every rule sits the button “Which tickets would this affect?” One click shows the list “Tickets this rule would affect right now” — the tickets the rule applies to at this moment, with number and title.

Below it says what the preview does not do: “The preview only reads. It changes nothing and writes no log entry. Unsaved changes are not included.” That last part matters: the preview works on the saved rule, not on what is currently in the form.

If the rule matches nothing at the moment, it says so too: “No ticket matches this rule right now.” That is the answer you want before switching it on — not afterwards on your customers’ tickets.

In the “THEN” block you pick from seven actions: “Send an e-mail”, “Set the status”, “Set the priority”, “Assign to a user”, “Remove the assignee”, “Hand over to another team” and “Set a follow-up”. “Add action” adds more; each has its own “Active” switch, so you can silence a single one without switching off the whole rule.

For “Send an e-mail” you tick the recipients one by one: “the requester”, “the assignee”, “the observers” and “a fixed address” — the last one with its own field for the address. For “Set a follow-up” you give a number, a unit and the note that will later sit on the ticket.

For “Hand over to another team” the hint sits right below it: “The ticket moves to that team and the current assignee is cleared. No second ticket is created.” So no duplicate appears — the same case simply changes hands.

A rule cannot close a ticket that is waiting for an approval, nor an incident that still has open reports.

Every time condition in the “WHEN” block has three parts: the kind, the comparison “longer than” and a number with a unit. There are five kinds: “Time since the ticket was created”, “Time without any activity”, “Time without a reply from the requester”, “Time without a public reply from an agent” and “Time without a status change”.

The unit decides how the time is counted — and it does so per condition: “minutes”, “hours” and “days” run through, at night and at the weekend too. “business minutes”, “business hours” and “business days” count against the team’s business-hours calendar, so only what falls inside opening hours is counted.

In everyday use the difference is big: three days are three days, whereas three business days counted from a Thursday in a Mon–Fri week land on the following Tuesday. A business day is a working day in the calendar of the team the ticket belongs to, even for a rule for “Every team”. Public holidays do not count. If the time starts outside opening hours, it counts from the next start of work. The “Set a follow-up” action counts “business days” the same way.

Below every rule sits a “Log” button. It opens the table “What this rule did” with one row per affected ticket: “When”, “Ticket”, “Cycle”, “Result” and “Details”. “Details” holds what exactly was done, for example “Set a follow-up: 01.10.2026 22:36”. If a rule has done nothing yet, it says so: “This rule has not done anything yet.”

The “Cycle” column is the reason a rule does not shout at you every minute: it acts on a ticket once per cycle. A cycle only ends when the rule no longer applies to that ticket — so if the customer replies and then goes quiet again, cycle 2 begins and the rule acts again.

On the ticket itself the rule appears as the author. In the history it shows up under its own name with an “Automation:” prefix, for example “Automation: High priority: bring it back to us”. So on every case you can look up whether a human or a rule acted — and if it was a rule, which one. Customers see “System” as the author instead of the rule’s name.

The header line of every rule also carries “Last run:” with the time of its last pass, or “never” for a rule that has never run.