Automation
The Automation category controls how work moves through Sift after it arrives: which queue it lands in and how it routes to agents, the workflows that act on it, the macros agents reuse, and the org-wide action policies. It has four pages: Queues, Workflows, Macros & Saved Responses, and Action Management.
Queues
The Queues page routes incoming conversations to the right people. Each queue matches items with a saved-search criteria, orders them by priority, and assigns them to the agents who work it.
- Criteria: each queue is defined by a saved search; any item matching it lands in the queue. A live preview shows matching records before you save.
- Assignees: the agents who can receive and respond to items. Access is granted by role, so the roles with access to a queue determine who can be assigned.
- Routing: auto-assign on arrival hands new items to eligible assignees, routing skills match items to agents, workload-aware assignment balances against each agent's open load, and SLA targets set response and resolution goals.
- Priority and the Default Queue: the highest-priority queue whose criteria match an item wins it. The Default Queue is the catch-all for anything unmatched, so nothing is lost.
Workflows
The Workflows page manages the automations that drive how content moves through Sift after it's ingested: classifying records, assigning them to queues and agents, applying tags, sending notifications, and triggering AI replies. A workflow is a visual flow of steps that runs against incoming events or on a schedule.
The page has four tabs: AI Goals (autonomous AI-agent runs, abstains, and action outcomes), Automations (the library of fixed-step automations, with name, description, and run activity), Schedules, and Notifications.
Macros & Saved Responses
The Macros & Saved Responses page manages reusable, templated replies your team applies to any message without retyping common answers. An agent can insert a macro into the composer, or a workflow can run one automatically. Each macro stores a title and body, can be shared org-wide or kept personal, and is searchable in the composer picker. See Macros for the full workflow.
Action Management
The Action Management page configures the org-wide policies that govern how actions and conversations behave. It has three tabs.
Support Settings
The operational behavior of actions and threads: a maximum ticket limit per customer (0 means unlimited), a self-service unassign my actions utility, and close settings - an auto-close timer for inactive actions and a thread-lock delay after a conversation closes.
Statuses
Custom action statuses and how they behave in the conversation workflow. Sift ships with defaults (Open, In Progress, Closed); you can add your own (for example "Waiting on Customer" or "Escalated"), give each a color and an open/closed state type, and choose the default status for new actions. The built-in Open and Closed statuses can be renamed and recolored but not deleted.
Feedback & CSAT
The customer-satisfaction survey Sift sends when conversations close. Sift uses a two-step survey (a rating prompt, then an optional written-feedback prompt), both of which you can word yourself. A managed list of close reasons controls which closes fire a survey, so spammy or disengaged closes don't ask for feedback.