Cadences — automated re-engagement follow-ups

Feature Name	Omnichannel Management
Feature ID	CrestApps.OrchardCore.Omnichannel.Managements

A cadence is a reusable, named series of follow-up messages that re-engages a contact who has gone quiet in an automated conversation. You define a cadence once, then select it in the Re-engagement field of any Automatic activity load. A load with no cadence selected never sends follow-ups, so re-engagement is off by default.

Cadences are administered from Interaction Center > Management > Cadences (requires the Manage cadences permission), alongside campaigns and dispositions. Cadences can be created, edited, and deleted; unlike campaigns, which cannot be deleted. For a step-by-step walkthrough, see Cadences in the user manual.

What a cadence contains

A cadence has a name, an optional description, an enabled flag, and an ordered list of steps. You can add as many steps as you like — each step is one follow-up message.

Each step has:

• After (minutes) — how long the contact must be silent, measured from the automation's previous message, before this step's follow-up is sent. Because the clock restarts after every message the automation sends (the opening and each follow-up), successive steps naturally space follow-ups further apart. For example, 60 then 1440 sends the first follow-up after an hour of silence, then the next after a further day.
• Message — either:
  • Defined message — you provide the exact text, which is sent to the contact verbatim; or
  • AI-generated — the AI composes the message from the conversation. You may add optional guidance that steers what it writes; leave it blank to let the AI decide entirely.

The number of steps is the cap on how many follow-ups are ever sent. When the last step has been sent, the cadence stops and the conversation is left to its normal no-response handling — so a cadence can never nudge a contact indefinitely.

Selecting a cadence on an activity load

On an Automatic activity load (Interaction Center > Management > Load Activities), the AI settings include a Re-engagement picker. Choose a cadence to enable follow-ups for every conversation loaded from that activity load, or leave it as No follow-up cadence to never follow up. The chosen cadence is snapshotted onto each activity when the activities are loaded, so editing or deleting a cadence later does not disturb conversations already in flight. See Load activities in the user manual.

The same activity load also has a Business hours field (see below), which every follow-up respects. It is shown only when at least one business-hours calendar exists.

Business hours

Every follow-up is background-initiated — the automation sends it on its own, not in response to a live message. Such sends are only made while the activity load's business-hours calendar is open, evaluated in the contact's local time zone, so a contact is never followed up after hours. Business-hours calendars come from the Contact Center Business Hours feature, which the SMS automation feature brings in automatically; when no calendar is set the cadence still runs but is not restricted by hours.

A live reply to a contact who is actively messaging is never gated — only the proactive follow-ups a cadence sends are. Likewise, a reply the automation owes to a message the contact just sent is completed normally, not treated as a follow-up.

Exporting and importing cadences

Cadences travel between environments through the Omnichannel Cadences deployment step and the OmnichannelCadence recipe step. An imported cadence keeps its identifier, so a campaign that selects it still points at it after the plan is replayed. Import cadences before the campaigns that select them.

{
  "steps": [
    {
      "name": "OmnichannelCadence",
      "Cadences": [
        {
          "ItemId": "7rq2m9x4k1c6v3b8n5t0h2y7z",
          "DisplayText": "Gentle reminder",
          "Description": "Two follow-ups for a contact who stops replying.",
          "Enabled": true,
          "Steps": [
            { "DelayMinutes": 60, "IsAiGenerated": false, "Message": "Just checking in. Do you still need help?" },
            { "DelayMinutes": 1440, "IsAiGenerated": true, "Message": "Offer to call them back at a time that suits them." }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

A step that is not AI-generated must carry its message, the same rule the editor applies; an entry that breaks it is reported and skipped.

How follow-ups are sent

A background task evaluates due follow-ups on a short interval. For each automated conversation it only acts when:

• a cadence is selected and enabled, and the conversation has not yet used all of the cadence's steps;
• the last thing said in the conversation was the automation's (if the contact has replied, a reply is owed instead of a follow-up);
• the contact has been silent longer than the current step's After (minutes); and
• the business-hours calendar is open for the contact.

When all of those hold, the step's message is sent (verbatim for a defined message, or freshly composed for an AI step), the step counter advances, and the no-response window is restarted so the contact has the full timeout to answer the follow-up before the conversation is closed out.