Duplicate follow-ups

How do you stop an automatic follow-up from going out right after you wrote to the customer?

To stop an automatic follow-up from going out right after you wrote to the customer, write to them from the mailbox connected to Muzau or from Muzau. A Muzau agent then stops the planned follow-up, withdraws those waiting for your approval and notes who wrote on the follow-up line. It also stops when the customer replies or another agent writes to them. A call or an email sent from another mailbox cannot be seen: you cancel the follow-up yourself.

Why a follow-up goes out right after you wrote

An automatic follow-up runs on a schedule set in advance. Meanwhile, the conversation carries on elsewhere: a salesperson replies to the customer in the morning, a colleague calls them, the customer's partner answers in their place. If the tool that follows up sees none of this, it still sends its “I'm getting back to you”, an hour after your email.

The customer then understands that messages go out without anyone reading them, and the trust your team is building wears thin. A follow-up is only useful if it takes into account what has happened since the last email. To set up the follow-ups themselves, see how to automate follow-ups from Gmail or Outlook.

How the agent goes about it

Input

Your sent emails picked up from the connected mailbox, and emails written from Muzau

It does

Stops the follow-up as soon as someone on the team, another agent or the customer has written

It delivers

A stopped follow-up and, when the team has written, the follow-up line showing who and on what date

An email from the team stops the automatic follow-up

When someone on your team writes to the customer from Muzau, or from a mailbox connected to Muzau, the follow-up in progress stops. Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365 connect, as do IMAP mailboxes from OVH or Ionos. Follow-ups that were waiting for your approval under “To follow up?” are withdrawn: you do not have to reject them one by one. The follow-up line says that the follow-up is stopped, who wrote to the customer and when. The mailbox is read again at least every fifteen minutes.

The agent's follow-ups in your Sent folder do not stop the follow-up

When your mailbox is connected, follow-ups usually go out from it, in the thread of your original email, with the person on the team who sent it in copy. With Gmail and Outlook, they therefore file in your Sent folder, next to your own emails. The agent recognizes its own: in your Sent folder, only an email written by someone on the team stops what follows.

One scheduled message per day and per customer

The follow-up also stops when another agent in your business writes to the person by email, or when a Muzau agent books a meeting with them. The same person never receives more than one scheduled message per 24 hours, all agents combined: a follow-up that falls on the day of another scheduled message is postponed, and beyond 2 days of delay it does not go out, which its line shows. If you sent two proposals to the same person, only the last one is followed up.

When the customer replies, or you wrote to them after a meeting

The follow-up stops as soon as the person replies, even from another address in the same thread, a partner replying for them for example. An out-of-office message does not count as a reply. If you wrote to the customer after a meeting and Muzau reads your mailbox, the post-meeting recap is withdrawn, or is not drafted at all: the follow-up opens on your own email. The commitments picked up during the meeting close too, with their pending reminders and follow-ups. A recap that attaches a commercial proposal is withdrawn only if your email also attaches its PDF or the Google Slides link.

Avoiding duplicate follow-ups, with or without a tool

One follow-up too many almost always comes from an exchange the tool did not see. A few habits are enough to make them rare.

• Reply in the original thread rather than in a new email: your message stays attached to the exchange, for your colleagues as for the tool that follows up.
• Write from the mailbox the tool reads. An email sent from a personal address, or from another company mailbox, leaves no trace where the follow-up looks.
• After a call or a visit, stop the follow-up right away: no email tool knows that you spoke to the customer.
• One customer, one person in charge of follow-up: when two people write to the same customer, agree on who follows up.
• Put the person who sent the original email in copy of the follow-up: if the customer replies to them directly, they will know to stop what follows.
• Before a follow-up written by hand, reread the whole thread, including replies from the other recipients, and check that no meeting was booked in the meantime.
• Do not mistake an out-of-office message for a reply: resume the follow-up on the return date it gives.

To take over an exchange that an agent was handling, see how to take back control of a conversation run by an AI.

What it does not do

• It does not see an email sent from a mailbox that is not connected to Muzau, nor a phone call: in that case, you cancel the follow-up yourself.
• It does not see a meeting added by hand in your calendar: only a meeting booked by a Muzau agent stops the follow-up.
• It does not see the reply the customer sends only to the colleague whose mailbox is not connected, without the agent in copy.

Frequently asked questions

Can a follow-up go out right after the customer replies?

A Muzau agent's follow-up stops as soon as the person replies, even from another address in the same thread. The connected mailbox is read again at least every fifteen minutes. An out-of-office message does not count as a reply: the follow-up continues.

I called the customer: how do I stop the planned follow-up?

A call cannot be seen in the mailbox. In Muzau, cancel the next follow-up: everything planned for that person stops, and for one minute, “Restore” puts it back as it was. A follow-up already waiting for your approval is withdrawn with “Don't send”.

The customer replies by text message or in the site chat: does the email follow-up stop?

Yes, as with an email reply, provided the message is attached to the same follow-up line or the same email address, for example the email given in the chat. A phone number alone is not enough.

Can a follow-up go out after the quote is signed on Yousign or DocuSign?

Not when Yousign or DocuSign is connected to Muzau: the signed quote is seen, and the follow-up stops or moves to the next step. For a quote signed another way, write “signed” or “accepted” in the status column of its line: it moves to “Settled / accepted”, and nothing more is followed up.

How do I know if a colleague has already followed up with the customer?

In Muzau, when a follow-up stops because someone on the team wrote to the customer, the follow-up line says so, with their name and the date. The agent's follow-ups go out in the thread of the original email, with the person who sent it in copy: they see each one go out.