Alps

Building Your First Automation

2 min readAug 21, 2026

In this article

A quick walkthrough of the automation builder: pick a trigger, add steps, and turn on an automation that runs on its own.

Automations let your team stop doing the same repetitive work by hand. Every automation follows the same simple shape: something happens, called a trigger, and then Alps carries out one or more steps in response.

Where to build one

Open Automations from Settings, under Inbox, or go directly to the Automations page. The builder is a visual canvas: your trigger sits at the top, and you add steps below it that run when the trigger fires.

The basic shape

  • Choose a trigger – the event that starts the automation, for example a customer sends their first message.

  • Add steps – conditions, replies, routing, or other actions that run in order.

  • Turn it on – an automation only runs once it's active, so nothing happens by accident while you're still building it.

Filtering by channel

You can scope an automation to a specific channel, web chat, email, WhatsApp, or SMS, so it only runs for conversations coming through the channel it's meant for.

Checking it's working

Every automation has its own analytics, so you can see how often it's triggering and confirm it's actually doing what you expect before you rely on it fully.

Next steps
Not sure what a trigger or a step actually does? See the dedicated guides for the full list of both.

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