Reply Rules

Reply Rules decide what your agent does on each incoming conversation: reply directly to the customer, leave an internal note for your team, or stay silent. Rules live in one place and apply across every integration you’ve connected. A “stay silent when a human is already on it” rule covers Zendesk, Intercom, Front, and any other channel at the same time.

For a walkthrough showing how Reply Behavior interacts with Attributes, Actions, and Rulebook end-to-end, see End-to-end: cancellation flow.

Product location

Open Rulebook → Reply Rules in the dashboard sidebar. This docs page covers only Reply Rules. Intent Rules and Business Rules have their own pages.

The three reply types

The page shows three cards, one per reply type. Each card is independent, you can configure rules on all three, just one, or none.

Reply type	Subtitle in the UI	Visible to
No Reply	Bot will not respond to the customer.	Nobody, no message is posted.
Internal Comment	Bot adds an internal note visible only to your team.	Your team only.
Direct Reply	Bot sends a response directly to the customer.	Customer and your team.

Terminology for the internal note varies by integration, Internal Note in Zendesk and Intercom, Internal Comment in Front, Case Comment in Salesforce. The behavior is the same: customer-invisible.

When multiple cards match

The three cards evaluate independently, a single conversation can match conditions on more than one. When that happens, the stricter behavior wins, in this priority order:

No Reply, highest priority. If a conversation matches a No Reply condition, the agent stays silent, even if Internal Comment or Direct Reply conditions would also match.
Internal Comment, wins over Direct Reply. If a conversation matches both an Internal Comment and a Direct Reply rule, the agent posts internally instead of publicly.
Direct Reply, the default. Fires only when no higher-priority card matches.

The principle: picking a stricter behavior is always a safe override. You don’t have to engineer mutually exclusive conditions, layer broad rules with narrower overrides. For example: a broad Direct Reply rule applies normally; a narrower Internal Comment rule overrides it for sensitive topics; a No Reply rule overrides everything else when a human is on the conversation.

When answer generation fails

On supported integration channels, an unrecoverable model failure during planning, knowledge search, input-tag selection, or answer generation changes the outcome to an internal failure note and human escalation instead of sending the failure text as a customer reply. A No Reply decision remains silent. Failure in output-tag selection alone does not trigger this fallback after a valid answer has been generated. The destination depends on the integration’s handoff support. Slack has no provider-side transfer path for this fallback: Fini records the no-reply outcome rather than posting the failure text into the channel. Inspect the conversation in Inbox when investigating a missing reply.

What you can match on

Inside each card, the condition builder offers fields from three categories. The dropdown organizes them, System fields at the top, then your Tag Groups, then your User Attributes.

Field picker dropdown inside the condition builder, showing three categorized sections. SYSTEM contains Integration Provider, Channel, Human Agent Assigned, Escalated Conversation. TAG GROUPS contains the active tag groups (e.g. Type of Issue, Sentiment, Product Area, Knowledge Gap). USER ATTRIBUTES contains the custom fields returned by the User Attributes API (e.g. plan, accountTier, signupDate).

System fields

Always available. Resolved before any AI classification happens.

Field	What it captures
Integration Provider	The integration the conversation came from, e.g. `zendesk`, `intercom`, `front`. Use to scope rules to a specific channel surface.
Channel	The channel within the integration, e.g. `email`, `chat`. Useful when one integration carries multiple channel types.
Human Agent Assigned	`True` if a human teammate is currently assigned to the conversation, `False` otherwise. The standard field for “don’t let the agent talk over a human.”
Escalated Conversation	`True` if the conversation has been escalated to a human (via the agent’s escalation path or a manual handoff).

Tag Groups

Every tag group configured for this account appears in the dropdown, General Tags, Errors, Type of Issue, Sentiment, and any custom groups you’ve built. Match against the tag values the model applies (e.g. Type of Issue equals disputes, Sentiment equals negative). See Tags for how groups and their tag values are configured.

User Attributes

Every attribute returned by your User Attributes API appears here, plan tier, signup date, country of residence, package name, whatever your endpoint exposes. Use these to match on properties of who the customer is, not what the conversation is about. See Attributes for how the attribute chain is configured.

Tag Group rules wait for classification; System and User Attribute rules don’t. Tag values are populated by the model after it reads the conversation, so a rule like Sentiment equals negative → No Reply only fires once tagging completes. Rules on Integration Provider, Channel, Human Agent Assigned, Escalated Conversation, and User Attributes resolve immediately on receipt of the conversation.

Operators

Each predicate has an operator that controls how the field is compared against the value. The dropdown offers fifteen operators covering single-value comparisons, list membership, date ranges, and presence checks.

Operator	What it does	Common use
Equals / Not Equals	Exact match on a single value.	The default. Most predicates use these.
Greater Than / Less Than	Numeric comparison.	Numeric attributes, credit score < 600, days since signup > 30.
Greater Than or Equal To / Less Than or Equal To	Inclusive numeric comparison.	Same as above but inclusive of the boundary value.
Contains	Substring match within a string field, or value present in a multi-value field.	Free-text fields, or tag groups configured as multi-select.
Date Before / Date After	Date comparison, parsing the value as a date.	Date-typed attributes, signupDate Date Before 2026-01-01.
In / Not In	Value matches any of a list of options (or none of them).	Multiple acceptable values for one field, Type of Issue In disputes, refunds, chargebacks.
Is Null / Is Not Null	The field is missing entirely (or is present).	Detecting when an attribute hasn’t been populated yet.
Is Empty / Is Not Empty	The field is present but the value is empty (or non-empty).	Distinguishing “never fetched” from “fetched but blank”.

The In operator is what “or check items in a list” (the link to the right of each condition group) creates, a single predicate that matches multiple values. Use it instead of writing three separate OR’d groups when the values differ only in the right-hand side.

Building a rule

Click a card to expand it. The conditions builder uses two levels of grouping: predicates inside a group are joined with AND; groups are joined with OR.

Reply Rules page in the Fini Demo workspace with No Reply, Internal Comment, and Direct Reply expanded to show their condition groups, enabled states, and save controls.

Expanded card showing two condition groups separated by an OR divider. The first group has IF Integration Provider Equals zendesk, AND Human Agent Assigned Equals True. The second group has IF Type of Issue In disputes, refunds, AND Sentiment Equals negative. Each group has Add another check and 'or check items in a list' affordances, and at the bottom is an Add alternative condition button.

Pick the card

Click the card for the behavior you want to trigger (No Reply / Internal Comment / Direct Reply). The card expands to show the conditions builder.

Add predicates to the first condition group

Under When should this check pass?, each IF / AND row is a predicate. Pick a field, pick the operator (typically Equals), and pick or type the value. All predicates in a group must be true for the group to match, they’re joined by AND.

Add an alternative group (OR)

Click + Add alternative condition at the bottom. A new group appears below an OR divider. The card matches if any group matches, within each group, all predicates still have to match.

Enable the card

Toggle the switch in the card’s top-right to on. The card needs at least one complete condition before it can be enabled.

Save

Saving commits the rule. Unsaved edits prompt a confirmation if you navigate away.

Example rules

Five patterns drawn from common configurations. The Conditions column shows what goes in the condition builder; OR-joined condition groups are stacked with an OR divider between them.

Pattern	Card	Conditions	Effect
Stay silent when a human is on the conversation	No Reply	`Human Agent Assigned Equals True`	The agent never replies on conversations a teammate has already picked up.
Stay silent on escalated Zendesk conversations	No Reply	`Integration Provider Equals zendesk` AND `Human Agent Assigned Equals True` OR `Integration Provider Equals zendesk` AND `Escalated Conversation Equals True`	On Zendesk, the agent stays out of the conversation either when a human is assigned or when the conversation has been escalated. This is the exact pattern visible in the screenshot above.
Internal note instead of direct reply on refunds	Internal Comment	`Type of Issue Equals refunds`	When the agent classifies a conversation as a refund issue, it drafts a note for the team rather than replying to the customer.
No reply for Enterprise accounts	No Reply	`plan Equals enterprise` (assuming your User Attributes API exposes a `plan` field)	Every Enterprise customer goes straight to a human; the agent doesn’t engage.
Block specific channels	No Reply	`Integration Provider Equals zendesk` AND `Channel Equals chat` OR `Integration Provider Equals slack`	The agent stays silent on Zendesk chat and all Slack channels. Useful when piloting on email only.

Why a rule isn’t firing

The card isn't enabled

Saving conditions does not auto-enable the card. The toggle in the card’s top-right must be on. Look for the green Enabled pill next to the card’s name.

A higher-priority card matched first

No Reply beats Internal Comment beats Direct Reply. If the conversation matches both the card you expected and a stricter one, the stricter card wins. Open the suspect conversation in the Inbox and check whether a No Reply or Internal Comment rule fired instead of the Direct Reply you were testing.

A User Attribute condition references a missing field

User Attributes come from your User Attributes API. If the field name in your condition doesn’t match what the API returns (typo, casing mismatch, attribute not yet added to the chain), the predicate evaluates to false. Check Configuration → Attributes to confirm the field is configured and returning a value.

The Integration Provider value is wrong

Integration Provider values are exact strings (zendesk, intercom, front, etc.), case matters. If the predicate uses Zendesk but the system stores zendesk, the rule won’t match. The condition builder’s dropdown shows the canonical values.

A predicate row was left incomplete

A predicate with no value selected evaluates to false, which can prevent its group from matching. Walk through each row in the expanded card and confirm every field, operator, and value is filled in.

Attributes

Define the User Attributes API chain that exposes customer fields for matching.

Rulebook

Once Reply Behavior decides the agent should reply, the Rulebook decides how, which flow, which actions, which response template.

Inbox

Audit Reply Behavior decisions by opening a conversation and reading the AI Steps panel to see which fields matched.

Getting Started

Agent Configuration

Deploy

Test & Ship

Performance & accuracy

Reply Rules

Product location