Message automation

Sidebar: Communication → Message automations

Module: Inbox — active on every account from the start.

What this is

A list of rules that write to your customers when nobody is at the keyboard — on WhatsApp, or on FlyB Chat, the chat behind your pages’ floating button.

Each rule is a sentence:

On this channel (and, on WhatsApp, these numbers), when this happens, if the lead looks like this, send this message.

Turning the sentence into a rule takes a few short steps, and the editor asks for them in that order. The screen is reachable from the sidebar under Communication → Message automations, and from the ⚡ button in the Inbox toolbar — which is usually where somebody is standing when they decide a message should have been automatic.

When the rule reacts to an incoming message it can also be narrowed to the words the customer used, and it can answer with a plain message written in the editor instead of an approved template. Both are covered below.

A rule can also have no trigger at all: a message kept ready, with its variables and buttons, that your team sends from the Inbox and that a funnel stage can send on FlyB Chat. See No trigger.

Rules do not have an order

Unlike a funnel stage’s automations, which run top to bottom and where the first redirect wins, these rules are independent. Every rule whose trigger fired and whose conditions matched sends its own message.

What stops one lead being messaged five times is set per rule: once per contact, or a minimum gap. Both are described below, and the list shows which one each rule is using. Two keyword rules that could both answer the same message are kept apart the same way, per rule, with exceptions.

1. Channel

Where the rule writes: WhatsApp or FlyB Chat — never both. It is the first question because it reshapes the rest of the editor:

The channel is fixed once the rule is saved, so a rule’s history always describes one channel. For the other channel, create a second rule — two rules with the same trigger on the two channels are two different rules, and the list marks each with its channel.

A FlyB Chat rule reaches only people who have opened the chat — which happens through a page or blog whose floating button is set to FlyB Chat. If you have none yet, the screen says so. A contact who has never opened the chat is recorded in the history as skipped, with that reason.

2. Numbers (WhatsApp only)

Which of your connected WhatsApp numbers the rule covers. A FlyB Chat rule skips this step.

The Numbers button in this screen’s header opens the same manager as Settings → Integrations: rename a number, see whether one has fallen over, change who can read it in the Inbox, or open its templates. Connecting a new number is still done on the Settings screen, because that is Meta’s own pop-up and its checklist.

For a trigger that comes from a conversation (the four WhatsApp triggers), this is a filter: a rule that does not cover the number a customer wrote to will not answer them. For every other trigger there is no conversation yet, so the same list decides which number the message goes out from — FlyB picks, in order:

1. the number the event arrived on, when there was one;
2. a number the contact already has a conversation on, if the rule covers it;
3. the rule’s own numbers, your default first.

Answering somebody from a different number than the one they have been writing to is how a business ends up looking like two businesses, which is why the order is that way round.

If every number a rule was pinned to gets disconnected, the rule stops sending. It does not quietly widen to all your numbers. The row says so in red, and the fix is to edit the rule and pick another number.

The numbers also decide what the rule can send. There is one WhatsApp channel, and the editor adapts to the numbers you pick. A number linked through WhatsApp Web has no templates and no 24-hour window, so:

3. Trigger

What has to happen for the rule to be looked at.

No trigger

The first entry of the list: No trigger — send manually or from the CRM pipeline. The rule never fires on its own. It is a message kept ready, with its variables and buttons, for two places:

Because nobody is answering an event, the steps that decide when and to whom step aside: the editor does not ask for numbers, conditions, a delay, quiet hours or how often, and saving the rule clears them. A person (or the stage’s own conditions) already decided who gets the message and when. On WhatsApp the message may be a free-form message or an approved template.

Switching a rule with no trigger off stops the funnel stages from sending it (their history records why). In the Inbox it stays available — a person choosing to send it is not the automation acting on its own.

Every other rule’s message can be sent from the Inbox as well — No trigger is simply the rule written for nothing else.

Conversation triggers

These four exist only here — they are about a conversation, not about a contact, and they follow the rule’s channel: on a WhatsApp rule they listen to WhatsApp conversations, on a FlyB Chat rule to chat conversations (and the editor names them accordingly — First message in the chat, Any message in the chat, and so on). A message in the chat never fires a WhatsApp rule, nor the reverse.

A reaction — an emoji the customer puts on one of your messages — is not a message: it fires none of these and does not end a period of silence. An emoji the customer sends as a message does. See Reactions.

The first two fire ON a message, which is what lets them be filtered by keywords (below). On WhatsApp those two — and the follow-up, while it waits under 24 hours — can also answer with a free-form message instead of an approved template; on FlyB Chat every trigger does. See The message.

Two details worth knowing about the follow-up:

• It counts from the customer’s last message, not yours. Replying does not reset it.
• A snoozed conversation is skipped. Snoozing is already somebody on the team saying “not until Tuesday” about that exact thread, and an automation writing over that decision is the automation being wrong.

And it really does fire once. If the customer comes back, writes, and goes quiet again, that is a new period of silence and the rule fires again — but the same silence never produces two messages, however many times FlyB checks.

Filtering by what the customer said

The two triggers that fire ON a message — Customer’s first message and Any message received — can be narrowed to the words in it. Add as many as you like (up to 50):

agendamento · agendar · marcar consulta

The rule then fires only when the message carries one of them, which is how “when somebody asks to book, send the calendar link” becomes a rule rather than a person watching the Inbox.

How the matching works — and the Trigger test button beside the list means none of it has to be taken on faith: type a message and it tells you whether the rule would fire, and which keyword decided it, using the same code the server runs:

• Case and accents never matter. agenda matches “Agenda”, “AGENDA” and “agenda?”; consulta médica matches “consulta medica” typed without the accent — which matters, because about half of what arrives from a phone keyboard has none. It works in any alphabet, and an emoji is a word of its own: 👍 matches “ok 👍”.
• Whole words, not fragments. agendar matches “quero agendar uma consulta” and does not match “reagendar”. That is what keeps a short keyword from quietly catching half of everything your customers write — and when you do want the fragments, that is what the wildcard is for.
• Phrases work. marcar consulta matches “quero marcar consulta amanhã”, punctuation and extra spaces included.

The wildcard

% stands for any text — nothing, a few letters, or several words. The Wildcard characters button beside Trigger test explains it with examples, and a keyword that uses it is marked on its chip.

Three rules cover every case:

• The start is still the start of a word, unless the keyword itself starts with %. That is why sim% catches “simples” but not “assim”.
• The end is open. A keyword with a % in it also catches longer words at its end, so cancelar%agenda catches “agendamento” without a second %.
• A space next to a % means a word boundary, for when you need to be exact: cancelar % wants cancelar as a whole word, and cancel% agenda wants agenda to start a word.

A wildcard keyword needs at least two letters besides the % — a% would be “any word starting with a”, which is a rule that answers almost everything. A % on its own is refused for the same reason: to answer every message, leave the list empty.

Exceptions

Rules are not ordered, and every rule that matches sends. So a rule for agenda and another for cancelar%agenda would both answer “quero cancelar a agenda” — the customer asks to cancel and receives the booking link in the same breath.

Add exceptions under the keywords is how the first rule steps aside: if the message carries any of them, the rule does not fire, even when one of its keywords is there too. Put cancel% on the booking rule and the two rules never answer the same message. Exceptions use the same matching as keywords, wildcard included, and they also work on their own — no keywords plus the exception parar is “every message except the ones asking us to stop”. The same word cannot be a keyword and an exception at once; the editor says so.

What happens with no keywords, and with no text

Leaving the list empty is not “matches nothing” — it is no filter at all, and the rule covers every message (minus any exceptions). A message with no text in it (a photo with no caption, a sticker, a location) never matches a keyword, because there is nothing in it that could have — so a keyword rule does not fire for it, and an exception-only rule does.

The tester is closed until you open it, so the only box on screen while you are adding keywords is the one that adds them. And if a keyword rule is not answering the way you expected, check its repetition setting first: with once per contact, a number you are testing from receives the message once — the second test from the same phone is correctly ignored, whatever words it uses.

The other two conversation triggers have no keyword box: one is about silence and the other about a clock, and whatever the customer happened to say six hours ago is not what either is reacting to.

Everything else

The same events that feed the CRM’s entry events, so a trigger means the same thing in both places.

Payment started fires the moment the guest of a calendar that charges goes to pay — before they pay — which makes it the trigger for reminding the ones who never finish.

Most of them can be narrowed to one thing: a form, a calendar, a stage, an e-mail template, or a plan (or one exact price). Leaving it on Any is a real choice and usually the right one — “every booking, whichever agenda” is one rule instead of five.

4. Conditions

The message only goes out when the contact matches all of them. (A rule with no trigger has no conditions: whoever sends it has already chosen the contact.)

It is the same filter builder as Contacts, the CRM automations and the Lead Score rules — same fields, same operators, same values — so a condition written in any of them means exactly the same thing.

A rule with no conditions covers every contact the trigger reaches.

5. The message

On FlyB Chat there is one kind — the free-form message — on every trigger; see On FlyB Chat below. The same is true on WhatsApp for a rule covering only numbers linked through WhatsApp Web (see Numbers). On the Cloud API there are two kinds, and on most triggers there is only one to choose from.

Free-form message

Written right here, in the rule. No submission to Meta, no waiting for approval, no per-message cost.

Which triggers offer it is decided by the 24-hour window rather than by preference. The window runs from the customer’s last message, so:

• Customer’s first message and Any message received fire at the instant the customer writes — which is the instant the window opens. It is always available there.
• Customer quiet for X hours counts from that same instant, so it fires with 24 − X hours of window left. At 6 hours there are 18 left; at 23 there is one; at 24 there is none.

So a follow-up may send a free-form message only while it waits less than 24 hours. Set it to 24 or more and FlyB refuses to save the rule and says why — every message it booked could only ever be skipped, and finding that out from the history a week later is the outcome the refusal exists to prevent. Use an approved template for the longer waits; that is the one message WhatsApp allows outside the window.

Every other trigger is about something that happened elsewhere, with no telling whether the customer has written recently at all, so those offer the template alone.

Making somebody get a template approved in order to answer “olá! recebemos sua mensagem” to a customer who is typing at them right now is a week of waiting for nothing, which is what this exists to stop.

Use Insert variable to pull in the contact’s details — the same variables, from the same picker, as an e-mail template and a template’s own service message, so {{contact.first_name}} means the same thing everywhere. That includes your own company’s details and the contact’s next appointment, already written out on the calendar’s clock and with the link that reschedules it. A variable with no value comes out blank. The preview beside the box draws the message as the customer will see it.

One thing to watch: a free-form message can still miss the window if the rule holds it long enough. The silence a follow-up waits out and the delay it then adds come out of the same 24 hours, and quiet hours can push it further still. The rule records in its history that it did not send, and why, rather than sending something you did not write — and the editor warns while you set the delay, counting the follow-up’s own wait into the total.

Buttons under it

Turn on Add buttons to put tappable buttons under the message. They are the same buttons a template’s service message carries, with the same two choices:

A link takes a label and an address, and both accept the same variables the message does — https://book.flyb.app/{{contact.custom_fields.calendar_slug}} is filled from the contact’s own record at the moment it is sent. The address may also be a variable: {{contact.custom_fields.invoice_link}}, where the field already holds the whole address, is accepted as it is rather than asked to start with http. What it becomes is still checked before the message leaves — if it is not a real http/https address by then, or if one of those variables comes back empty, the message still goes out without the button: losing a link is a smaller loss than losing the message.

A message button takes one field, because the text on the button is the message. Tap “Quero agendar” and WhatsApp puts exactly that into the conversation as a message from the contact. It appears in the Inbox, it re-opens their 24-hour window, and — the reason it is worth having — it can fire another rule, keyword filters included. So one rule can offer three choices and three other rules can answer them, without anybody typing a word.

For that to be dependable the text takes no variables and is capped at the 20 characters WhatsApp allows: it is the message, and a text that arrived different for every contact would match some of your keyword rules and not others.

How many, and the one combination WhatsApp does not allow. A message can carry up to three message buttons — “Quero agendar”, “Só uma dúvida”, “Agora não” — or one link button on its own. Those are the only two shapes: WhatsApp sends a link as a different kind of message from the one that carries replies, and there is no version that holds both. So the editor offers a second button only while nothing in the set is a link, and says why where the second one would have gone. A template does not have this limit — see the template’s own buttons — because Meta reviews a template before it is ever sent.

No buttons on WhatsApp Web numbers. A number linked through WhatsApp Web cannot show buttons, so a rule whose numbers are all WhatsApp Web ones — picked one by one, or All numbers when you have no other kind, and every rule with no trigger in that case — does not offer them: put the link in the message itself (“Book here: https://…”). A rule that already carries buttons there keeps them until you decide: Move into the text writes each one at the end of the message as “label: address”, and Remove buttons drops them — until then they are sent as text, which is also what the preview shows. With at least one Cloud API number in scope, the buttons stay: the Cloud API numbers show them, and the WhatsApp Web ones receive them as text. A message prepared for a calendar by the template wizard follows the same rule — with only WhatsApp Web numbers, its manage your booking link arrives already written in the text.

Two more things to keep in mind. A message with buttons is limited to 1,024 characters rather than the usual 4,096 — past that the message is sent in full and the buttons are dropped, and the editor warns you first. And a rule on Any message received that repeats, with no minimum gap, whose button text its own keywords accept, will answer its own button: the contact taps, that becomes a message received, and the rule fires again. The editor points this out where it happens; a minimum gap, once per contact, or keywords the button text does not contain all settle it.

On FlyB Chat

A FlyB Chat rule always sends a message written in the rule, with the same editor, the same Insert variable picker and the same buttons as the WhatsApp free-form message above. What changes is what FlyB Chat does not have:

• No templates and no 24-hour window. The chat is FlyB’s own channel, so any trigger — a booking, a payment, a funnel move, a follow-up after three days — can send a plain message. There is nothing to approve and no per-message cost.
• No 1,024-character limit with buttons. That ceiling is WhatsApp’s.
• Buttons are drawn the way WhatsApp draws them, as rows under the bubble. A link opens in a new tab; a message button sends its own text into the chat as the contact’s next message — which appears in the Inbox marked as a button reply and can fire another rule, keyword filters included, exactly as on WhatsApp.

The preview is the chat widget’s own bubble. On Appointment booked and Appointment cancelled, {{booking.*}} describes that appointment.

A new visitor filling the chat’s identification form is a Contact created (or Form submitted) event, and a welcome rule on either reaches them in the chat they just opened: FlyB opens the chat before the message goes out.

Approved template

WhatsApp only. Picked from the templates of the numbers the rule covers, listed by number. The templates themselves are managed under Communication → WhatsApp templates — see Message templates.

Meta approves a template per WhatsApp Business Account, so the same template may exist on one of your numbers and not on another. The picker shows each number with its own templates; a rule stores the template’s name, so choosing it marks it on every number that has it — and a number that lacks it is visibly the one missing. The editor also warns you when the one you chose is only approved on some — on the rest, the send would fail.

On Appointment booked and Appointment cancelled, a template filled from {{booking.*}} describes that appointment — the one just booked, or the one just cancelled — rather than the contact’s next one.

Delay

How long to wait after the trigger. Zero is “right away”. Delay, quiet hours and how often are not asked for on a rule with no trigger: it goes out the moment somebody sends it.

The delay is there because an instant reply to a form submission reads as a robot. Two minutes does not. It is also how you send something a while after the event — “we’ll call you tomorrow morning” the day before the meeting.

Quiet hours

A window in which the rule writes to nobody, as two whole hours in a time zone you choose.

The message is not dropped — it waits. A form filled at 23:40 still produces its welcome message; it goes out when the window ends. Skipping it would make the rule silently unreliable in a way nobody notices for weeks.

The window may cross midnight (22:00 → 08:00 is the normal case). Setting both ends to the same hour is refused, because it does not mean anything.

How often

Once per contact is the default, and it is the safe one: almost every rule anybody writes is “greet them”, “follow them up”, “confirm it” — things a person should receive once. A rule that should have repeated is noticed the first time you expect a second message; one that repeats when it should not have is noticed by your customer, on their phone, four times.

The exception worth knowing is a keyword rule. “When somebody asks to book, send the link” usually wants to apply every time — with once per contact, the customer who asks again next month gets nothing. The editor says so when you pick that combination.

With every time, set a minimum gap as well. It is the shortest time between two messages from this rule to the same contact — somebody sending four lines in a row is one conversation, not four.

Both are enforced by FlyB itself, not by the rule remembering: a message that has already been booked for a contact cannot be booked twice, whatever happens on the way.

The list

Each row reads as the rule: the trigger on the left — with the channel’s mark on its corner, the WhatsApp logo or the FlyB Chat icon — the message on the right, and between them only the chips that change what happens — the numbers (or FlyB Chat), the keywords and their exceptions, the conditions, a delay, quiet hours, and the repetition setting. A rule with none of those shows none of them, which is what makes the ones that do appear worth reading. A rule with no trigger shows where it can be used instead: Inbox, and CRM when its message can go through FlyB Chat.

Filters and search

Under the counters, a row of chips narrows the list:

Each chip counts what it would show with the other filters applied. The two channel chips appear where the account can use WhatsApp — with FlyB Chat alone there is nothing to tell apart.

The search box beside them finds a rule by its name or by what it says: the words of a free-form message, a template’s name and text, and the buttons’ labels. Case and accents do not matter, and every word typed has to appear somewhere — “boas vindas agenda” finds the rule named Boas-vindas whose message mentions the agenda. Press / to jump to the box, and Esc to clear it.

A rule you switch on or off stays where it is until you change the filters, so the same switch is still there to undo it.

The switch on the row turns a rule off immediately, without opening the editor. Turning a rule off is what somebody does in a hurry when it is messaging the wrong people.

The counters at the top of the screen cover the last 24 hours for what was sent and what failed. “Queued” has no window — a backlog is a backlog however old.

History

The 🕘 button on a row opens that rule’s firing history: every time it fired, newest first.

It shows the messages the rule’s trigger sent, and also the ones sent without it: a row sent by a person from the Inbox says Sent by and who, and one sent by a funnel stage says CRM and which stage — plus the channel, when it went out on one that is not the rule’s own (a WhatsApp free-form message sent through FlyB Chat).

Crucially it also shows the firings that did not send a message, each with the reason in a sentence:

The question somebody opens this with is almost never “did it work” — it is “why has it not written to anybody”. Skipped, with its sentence, is usually the answer.

On a keyword rule each firing also names the keyword that let the message through, as it was written on the rule at that moment — with twenty keywords and a % or two among them, that is the entry to change when a customer received the wrong message. A message that matched no keyword, or hit an exception, is not a firing and does not appear here.

Clicking a contact’s name opens their thread in the Inbox.

In the Inbox

A message sent by a rule — on either channel — carries a purple ⚡ badge with the rule’s name in the conversation, so a colleague reading the thread can tell “my teammate answered”, “our system sent this” and “nobody has replied to them yet” apart without asking. When a teammate sent a rule’s message by hand, the badge is followed by their name.

Any rule’s message can be sent from a conversation with ⋮ → Send an automation message — see Sending an automation message. A message sent that way does not count towards the rule’s once per contact or minimum gap: those describe what the automation does on its own.

The name is frozen onto the message when it is sent. Renaming or deleting the rule later does not rewrite the history, and the messages it already sent stay in the conversation.

Plan limit

On Check-in the limit is counted two ways:

• Creating a rule counts every rule in the list, switched on or off. With two already there, New automation offers an upgrade instead of opening the editor — deleting one makes room.
• Switching a rule on counts the active ones. With two already on, the switch — on the row or in the editor — offers the upgrade instead. Turning one of them off first frees the place.

If the account holds more than two rules, after a downgrade or a cancelled subscription, none of them is deleted. The next time this screen is opened, the two most recently created of the active rules stay on and the older ones are paused. The screen says how many it paused, and a notice stays above the list for as long as there are more rules than the plan runs. You choose which two run by turning one off and another on, and an upgrade lets you switch them all back on.

A paused rule sends nothing on its own — nor from a funnel stage. A message it had already queued is skipped when it comes due, with the reason in its history. A rule with no trigger counts towards the limit like any other.

Who can use it

Message automation is its own permission, separate from the Inbox. Reading somebody’s conversations and writing the machine that sends messages on your behalf are different responsibilities, and plenty of teams want the first handed out widely and the second to two people.

See Settings → Team to change it per member.