Trigger an automation - Heyy Help Center

Trigger automation is the second action type. It lets the employee kick off an existing automation mid-conversation — useful for internal notifications, assigning a chat to a teammate, or starting a workflow your main automation does not handle inline.

Add the action

On the Actions tab, click Add action and choose Trigger automation.
Provide an action name.
Add any input parameters the target automation expects, the same way you would for a Custom API action — friendly name, type, description, required toggle.
Select the specific automation this action should fire.
Save.

Input parameters do not always need to come from the customer typing something in. The employee can fill them from three sources:

Source	Example
The conversation history itself	The customer already mentioned their order number earlier in the thread.
The output of a previous action	An earlier Custom API call already returned the value this automation needs.
Asking the customer directly	The employee asks a specific question to gather what is missing before it can call the action.

For example, if the employee captures a customer’s email mid-conversation, it can feed that value directly into the triggered automation as a live input, without any manual step from your team.

Trigger automation action

Common uses

Use case	What it does
Internal notification	Notify a team or teammate the moment a specific situation comes up mid-chat.
Assign a chat	Hand a conversation to a specific teammate or team without waiting for an exit point to close it out.
Follow-up workflow	Start a separate journey — a nurture sequence, a fulfillment process — without blocking the current reply.

Reference this action in a guideline with @Actions so the employee knows exactly when to invoke it. Test the trigger path in the Playground and confirm the target automation is published and appropriate for the current channel before going live.