Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Also required | Copilot |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
A procedure is the set of written steps auto assist follows when it suggests a reply, a custom action, a macro or a direct instruction to an agent working a ticket. It is documentation that does something, and unlike documentation it gets measured.
What it contains
- When it applies.
- The steps, in order.
- The conditions: if this, then that.
- What to do when a step cannot be completed.
- What must never happen.
Written for a person, read by both
The same text guides auto assist and reads as an instruction to a new colleague. That is the useful property: your process documentation and your automation stop being two things that drift apart.
It gets a scorecard
Once published for 30 days, every procedure shows how many tickets it was applied to, how often agents accepted its suggestions and how often they edited them. No process document you have ever written told you whether people followed it.
That changes what maintenance means. A procedure with a high edit rate is not a document somebody dislikes; it is a document that is wrong in a specific place, and the agents editing it are telling you where.
Different from an article
An article explains something to a customer. A procedure tells your side how to handle a case, including the parts a customer never sees: which field to set, when to check something, when to involve somebody else.
Different from a macro
A macro applies a fixed set of changes and text. A procedure reasons about the situation: it can check a condition, take one path or another, and adapt what it proposes to what the ticket says. Macros are still right for the simple repeated action; procedures are for cases with steps and decisions.
Different from a generative procedure
Worth separating, because the names are nearly the same. This kind guides auto assist, which suggests to a human agent, and comes with the Copilot add-on. A generative procedure guides an AI agent talking directly to a customer, and belongs to a use case. Its capabilities used to need the AI agents - Advanced add-on and are now included across the Suite and Support plans. Different feature, different place.
Some of them write themselves
AI reads your tickets each week and may draft up to three procedures per brand, marked as AI generated. Drafts are never published on their own, so this costs you review time rather than control, and the drafts are a fair description of what your team does.
Why writing one is worth it anyway
The exercise forces the question nobody has answered: how do we handle this? Teams routinely discover that three agents do it three ways, and that discovery is worth the hour even before automation.
They need maintenance
A procedure describing last year's process is followed faithfully and wrongly. Put them in the same review rhythm as your articles, and let the metrics tell you which to open first.
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