Nobody likes the feeling of sending an email query to a service provider and getting no response back for hours, days, or weeks. Did my email send? Was my email received? Was my email totally ignored? Why does everybody hate me?

To help you and your teams to combat your customers’ feelings of mystery, abandonment and lack of validation, SendBoard introduced the concept of auto-reply template messages. When enabled, your custom message is sent as a reply to every new email arriving on your board. Auto-reply templates can be a super useful tool to respond to inbound emails with an instant notification of receipt, a ticket number for traceability, an estimate of resolution time or could even include some generic frequently asked questions or content links.

But can we do more?

Here’s a solution that can help extend your automated replies with additional content to feel more personal, more relevant and potentially solve customer’s queries before you’re even aware they exist.

How to use Butler to automatically respond to specific phrases in email queries arriving in Trello

• Firstly, we’re assuming you have the SendBoard Power-Up enabled on your Trello board so that you can receive new emails as cards. If not, click here to get up and running.

• If you’ve never used Butler before, you might want to run through this introduction to Butler before continuing.

• If you haven’t tried out SendBoard’s Saved Replies feature, check out this article for a quick primer.

• If you’re interested in SendBoard’s @reply or @email functionality, check out this article for more info.

Our planned solution is to empower your Trello board with the ability to search for specific text within the content of new inbound mails and automatically respond with a predefined message template if there is a match.

As an example, let’s say your team commonly receives emails from users who can’t login to their account. It might save you hundreds of hours of support if your board could automatically respond to any email that arrives containing the phrase “forgot my password” with content specifically designed to assist with troubleshooting password woes.

You could do the same for any frequently asked question, delivery tracing request, order enquiry or complaint, and point the user directly to a relevant page on your website or simply reply with relevant piece of content.

Let’s flesh out the forgotten password example.

Steps to setup your smart AI Trello board:

Create a new list on your Trello board called “Auto Responded”.

Create a SendBoard saved reply and give it a nice friendly keyword. 

• e.g. PasswordAutoResponse

• Create a new Butler rule with the following trigger:

  • When a comment containing ‘forgot my password’ is posted to a card in the list "Inbox".

• Add an action to your rule:

  • Post comment “@reply ##PasswordAutoResponse”.

• Add another action to your rule:

  • Move the card to the “Auto responded” list. 

That’s it! You’ll never need to deal with another “I forgot my password” email ever again. You’ve upgraded your Trello board to be a genius natural language processing platform and now you and your team can retire in peace as our AI overlords take over. 

Taking it even further

The above example simply looks for a single string of text in an email (“forgot my password”). In real life, there are lots of different ways people might describe that issue (e.g. “I forgot my login details”). And there might be some phrases that indicate that the customer has already tried to reset their password (e.g. “I didn’t get the email to reset my password”). Butler actually supports a much more advanced way to identify content within an email that allows us to support complex conditions like this. When setting up your trigger, you can use regular expressions within the text search.

The above trigger will fire for any comment containing “forgot my password” OR “forgot my login” but not if the comment contains “didn't get the email”. You can use a tool like Regex101 to help put together a regular expression that meets your exact needs.

You can add as many combinations of “text search > saved reply” as your team needs by just copying the rule and adjusting it. You might end up with a list of Butler rules that looks something like this:

when a comment containing "forgot my password" is posted to a card in list "📥 Inbox", post comment "@reply ##PasswordAutoResponse", and move the card to the bottom of list "Auto Responded"

when a comment containing "my delivery" is posted to a card in list "📥 Inbox", post comment "@reply ##ShippingStatus", and move the card to the bottom of list "Auto Responded"

when a comment containing "payment" is posted to a card in list "📥 Inbox", post comment "@reply ##PaymentFAQs", and move the card to the bottom of list "Auto Responded"

You can also easily add your own additional filters to the Butler triggers, for instance - only apply to comments on cards with a specific label attached.

If you'd like to learn about more advanced text matching with Butler and SendBoard, check out this article on extracting text from emails.