Rules

Rules pick out the conversations your team should handle with extra care: billing questions, refund requests, legal letters, a customer asking for a human. Overdesk checks each new reply draft against them, records which rule matched, and can hand the conversation to the right person. Every workspace starts with a set of starter rules, and admins can adjust them.

What a rule does when it matches

The draft is written and placed in your help desk as usual, whatever the rules say. On top of that:

• The decision is recorded on Decisions with the rule's name and its reason.
• The draft carries a badge on Agent drafts: Held for a topic rule, Escalated for an escalation rule.
• A rule under Escalate to a human raises an alert for your team.
• A rule with someone chosen under Hand over to assigns the conversation to them in your help desk and raises an alert naming them. See Escalation.

One decision per draft

Each draft gets a single decision, and the first matching rule makes it. Overdesk checks the topic rules first, then Escalate to a human, then Candidate gates.

That order matters when you hand rules to people. A customer who asks for a real person about an invoice matches Billing first, so Human agent requested does not fire for that draft. If billing conversations should reach someone, choose a target under Hand over to on Billing too.

How matching works

• Keywords match anywhere in the subject or in the customer's own messages, in any case, including inside longer words. cancel also matches "cancellation".
• Tag conditions match the tags on the conversation, including the ones Triage adds.
• The customer list matches a full email address exactly, or a whole domain: acme.com covers every address at acme.com and its subdomains.

The starter rules

The topic rules are listed first on the Rules tab:

Rule	Starts	Matches when
Billing	On	The conversation is tagged type:billing, or mentions words such as invoice, charged, payment, subscription or pricing
Refunds and cancellations	On	Words such as refund, money back, chargeback, dispute or cancel
Legal and privacy	On	Words such as legal, lawsuit, attorney, GDPR, "delete my data", privacy or complaint
Account security	On	Words such as login, "locked out", hacked, unauthorized, fraud or identity
Excluded customers	On	The customer's address or domain is on your list, which starts empty

Under Escalate to a human:

Rule	Starts	Matches when
Human agent requested	On	The customer writes "speak to a human", "real person", "talk to someone" or similar
Angry language	Off	Words such as ridiculous, useless, unacceptable, furious or scam
Repeated back-and-forth	Off	The customer has written 3 messages or more
Low confidence	Off	The draft's confidence score is below 80
No knowledge-base match	Off	Nothing in your knowledge base supports the draft

Under Candidate gates:

Rule	Starts	Matches when
High or medium urgency	On	The conversation is tagged urgency:high or urgency:medium
Urgency not set	On	The conversation has no urgency tag
Bug reports	On	The conversation is tagged type:bug, or mentions error, broken, crash or "not working"
Automatic replies and bounces	On	The message reads like an out-of-office reply, a no-reply sender or a bounce

Angry language starts off because blunt keywords also fire on harmless sentences. Turn it on and watch Decisions for a few days before you hand it to anyone.

Some of the rules that start off carry an Unproven signal badge. Once switched on, each is checked like any other rule. Negative sentiment also appears in the list: Overdesk does not score the customer's tone when it drafts, so that rule never matches. Use Angry language instead.

Between them, the two urgency gates match most conversations. If you pick someone under Hand over to on one of them, the tab warns you that they will be handed most of your queue.

Change the rules

1. Open Guardrails → Rules.
2. Use the switch beside a rule to turn it on or off.
3. Edit a rule's Keywords as a comma-separated list. For Excluded customers, list addresses or domains under Customers / domains.
4. Under Hand over to, choose an escalation target, or Nobody, just alert the team. Targets are set up on the Escalation tab first.
5. Press Save changes.

Only admins can change rules. Everyone else sees them read-only. Tag and signal conditions show as a line of text under the rule and cannot be edited here.

Until you save a change, a banner says these are Overdesk's starter rules. Once you save, your edited set replaces the defaults for your workspace.

Excluded customers

Excluded customers marks conversations from people you name, such as a key account or a customer your account manager handles personally. Their drafts still arrive as usual, carry the Held badge, and show in the decision log with the reason. To send those conversations straight to one person, choose that person under Hand over to on this rule.