Control who Captain replies to and when

Discover

You can choose which customers the assistant replies to (Audience) and when (Schedule). Conversations the assistant does not pick up stay Open for your team. Audience and Schedule belong to the assistant, so they apply to every inbox it is connected to.

Plan & access: Startups, Business or Enterprise : Pricing & Plans. Administrators change these settings.

Set up & try

Before you start

• An assistant connected to an inbox. See Set up a Captain assistant and connect your inboxes.

• For a schedule, business hours turned on for that inbox, in the inbox's own settings. See Business Hours and Auto-Responder.

• For audience rules on your own data, the contact custom attributes you want to use. See Understanding Contacts.

Choose the audience

1. Go to Captain > Assistants, open the assistant, and go to Settings > Audience.

   

2. Choose:

   • Everyone: the assistant replies in every conversation in its inboxes. This is the default.

   • Specific audience: the assistant replies only to customers who match your conditions.

3. For a specific audience, add conditions. Each has an attribute, an operator and a value.

   • Contact attributes: Name, Email, Phone, Identifier, Country, City, Company, Created at, Last activity, Blocked, Labels.

   • Conversation attributes: Logged-in user, Browser language. Browser language comes from the website widget only, so it does not work for WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or other channels. Labels means contact labels, not conversation labels. Logged-in user means the visitor was verified with identity validation (HMAC) in your website widget.

   • Your contact custom attributes.

   • The operators you can pick depend on the attribute. For example, Name offers only equal and not equal, Email also offers contains (use it to target a domain such as @acme.com), and dates offer greater than, less than and days before.

   

4. Choose whether customers must match all conditions or any of them. You can group conditions, for example "Plan is Pro AND (Country is US OR Country is Canada)". You can nest groups one level deep: a group can contain sub-groups, but a sub-group cannot contain another group.

   

5. Save.

Choose the schedule

1. In the same Settings, open Schedule.

2. Choose Anytime (default), During business hours, or Outside business hours.

   

3. Save.

Both rules must pass: the assistant replies only when the customer is in the audience and it is inside the schedule.

Test it

1. Start a new conversation as a customer who matches, inside the schedule. The assistant replies.

2. Start one as a customer who does not match. It goes to your team with no assistant reply.

Get value

• Common setups: assistant only outside business hours; assistant only for logged-in website users; assistant for everyone except customers with a "VIP" label.

• The rules are checked when a conversation starts or a resolved one reopens, not on every message. Once the assistant is in a conversation it stays until the conversation is resolved or handed off. Changes apply to new and reopened conversations only.

• Text matching ignores case. Phone numbers match with or without the leading +. A checkbox attribute that was never set counts as unchecked.

• The schedule follows the inbox's business hours and their time zone. If the time zone is wrong, the assistant can be off for most of your customers' day, with no warning.

• These rules decide when the assistant joins on its own. An agent can still hand any conversation to the assistant from the assignee dropdown, and that ignores audience and schedule. See Set up a Captain assistant and connect your inboxes.

Troubleshoot