Automations

Automations are the difference between a phone system that records what happened and one that acts on it.

Each rule is three parts: when this happens → only if these are true → do this.

CRM → Automations

What you can react to

Almost anything the system does:

What you can do

Notes and emails support {{name}}, which is replaced with the contact's name.

Conditions

Conditions are what turn a blunt trigger into a useful rule. Without them, "when a call completes" fires on every single call.

Each condition is a field, an operator and a value, and all of them must be true for the rule to run.

You can filter on two kinds of field:

• Event fields — what the trigger itself carries. For a completed call that's sentiment, quality score, duration, cost, whether it was resolved, and any extracted variables.
• Contact fields — the whole contact record, whatever the trigger. Their stage, tags, email, status, when they were created, and every custom field you've defined.

That second group matters more than it looks: even a thin trigger like "contact created" can be filtered on stage, tags and custom fields, because the contact is loaded before conditions are checked.

Rules worth stealing

Rescue unhappy callers When a call completes · sentiment is negative · schedule a follow-up in 2 hours.

Chase the ones that went nowhere When a call completes · resolved is false · add tag "needs attention" and schedule a follow-up in 24 hours.

Advance your pipeline automatically When an appointment is booked · move the contact to "Consultation booked".

Recover a missed follow-up When a follow-up fails · schedule another one in 48 hours. (Two failures in, stop — see the loop warning below.)

Confirm bookings by email When an appointment is booked · send an email with the details.

Flag high-value enquiries When a call completes · custom field "budget" is greater than 5000 · add tag "priority" and send an email to your team.

Win-back When a contact's stage changes to "Lost" · add a note recording why · remove the "active" tag.

Building one

1. 1

   Name it

   Something you'll recognise in six months. "Negative sentiment → 2h follow-up" beats "Rule 3".

2. 2

   Pick the trigger

   The form then shows you exactly which fields that trigger makes available.

3. 3

   Add conditions

   Start with one. It's easier to loosen a rule that never fires than to unpick a rule that fired on everything.

4. 4

   Pick the action and fill in its settings

   Delay in hours, target stage, tag name, or email subject and body.

5. 5

   Watch the run counter

   Each rule shows how many times it has fired. A rule sitting at zero after a week is either too strict or its trigger never happens.

Managing them

The list shows every rule as trigger → action, with a badge for how many conditions it has and a run count. Each can be switched off without deleting it.

You can't edit a rule's trigger or action after creating it — only enable, disable and delete. To change what a rule does, delete it and make a new one.

Requirements and limits

• Automations need Professional or above. On lower plans you can create rules, but they never run. This catches people out — the page isn't locked, the engine just skips.
• Sentiment and resolution conditions need AI call analysis, which is metered monthly. If you've exhausted the allowance, those fields are empty and rules filtering on them won't match.
• Your plan caps how many automations you can have. More are available as an add-on.

Why a rule didn't run

In order of how often it's the answer:

1. The event had no contact attached. Actions all target the contact linked to the event. An inbound call from an unknown number with no matching contact can't have its stage changed. This is the single most common cause.
2. A condition didn't match. Particularly conditions on AI-derived fields — if the analysis didn't run for that call, sentiment is empty and nothing matches it.
3. Your plan doesn't include automations.
4. The rule is switched off.

Cautions

• Every matching rule runs. There's no ordering and no "stop after the first match". Two rules that both move the stage will both fire, and the last one wins.
• Watch for loops. A rule triggered by "stage changed" whose action changes the stage can chain into another rule. Add conditions that narrow it to specific stages.
• Follow-ups aren't de-duplicated. Three matching rules that each schedule a follow-up create three calls to the same person. Adding a tag, by contrast, is safe to repeat.
• A rule with an empty tag or stage silently does nothing. Fill in the action's settings.
• There's no retry. If a rule fails to run for a technical reason, it isn't attempted again.

Automations vs webhooks

Both react to the same events. The difference is where the work happens:

• Automations act inside Vocallie — stages, tags, notes, follow-ups, emails.
• Webhooks push the event to your own systems so you can do anything.

Use automations for CRM housekeeping and webhooks when another system needs to know.