Send First Response

Send First Response lets Mizo draft a short list of clarifying questions for the end user on a new ticket — and, depending on your automation level, send that email itself before a technician ever opens the ticket. It closes the information gap that normally costs a technician a back-and-forth email before they can start real work.

Why It Matters for MSPs

• Faster time-to-first-touch. Customers get a response the moment a ticket comes in, even before a technician looks at it.
• Fewer round trips. Technicians start with the information they need instead of chasing it down themselves.
• Stays in its lane. Mizo never asks about anything your team already manages — device names, software versions, network setup, or licenses stay off-limits, regardless of any per-client customization. Those restrictions are fixed and aren’t overridable per client.

How It Works

Mizo analyzes every new ticket as part of its regular processing, right after checking for relevant KB articles and assets. It decides whether the customer’s request is missing information a technician would need before starting — for example, when something started, whether it happens every time, or which of two devices on file is affected.

If nothing needs clarifying, Mizo asks nothing at all — no draft, no to-do, no email, and no visible trace anywhere on the ticket. This is expected for well-detailed tickets, not a malfunction. Mizo also treats machine-generated tickets (alerts, promotional/automated tickets) as generally not needing questions, though this is a judgment call the AI makes case by case rather than a hard rule that blocks certain ticket types outright.

When Mizo does have questions:

• Recommendation — Mizo prepares the questions and shows them as a to-do. A technician reviews them in a chat-style composer, can ask Mizo to draft the email, edit it, and explicitly send it. Nothing reaches the customer without a person confirming.
• Automation — Mizo drafts both the questions and the email at the same time, and sends the email itself, with no human step, on the ticket’s first pass only.

Mizo still analyzes every ticket and decides whether questions are needed even when this feature is turned fully Off — that analysis is part of Mizo’s regular per-ticket work, not something this setting switches off. Turning the setting off only stops Mizo from drafting a ready-to-send email and from sending anything automatically.

If Mizo reprocesses a ticket later (for example after new information comes in), it refreshes the questions and, if a technician hasn’t yet acted on the earlier draft, refreshes the draft email too — but the reprocess path never sends anything, it only rewrites the stored draft. An automatic send only happens on a ticket’s first pass, enforced by a first-pass check plus a short-lived internal lock — very reliable, but see Best Practices for the one edge case where a duplicate is possible.

Once an email goes out, Mizo logs an internal follow-up note and, if configured, a billable time entry, and can advance the ticket’s status.

How to Use It (Step-by-Step)

1. In Workflow, find Send pre-assistance questions by email.
2. Choose Off, Recommendation, or Automation.
3. Use the First response communication rules field to steer tone, greeting style, and how many questions to include — this can’t override the hard rule against asking about the managed environment.
4. At Recommendation, review drafted questions in the ticket’s chat panel, edit if needed, and send.
5. Optionally turn on Log time after pre-assistance email if you want sending the email (automatic or manual) to also log a PSA time entry; with it off, only the internal note is created.

Best Practices

• Start at Recommendation, especially for new tenants or sensitive accounts, and move to Automation once drafts are consistently on-target.
• Confirm the client’s PSA ticket has a valid contact email before enabling Automation — the email goes to whoever is listed as the ticket’s contact at the moment of sending, which isn’t necessarily the same person named in the email’s greeting. Turning on contact assignment/attribution automation reduces this risk by keeping the PSA’s ticket contact current.
• If a customer reports being emailed twice, check the audit trail first — the most common cause is a technician sending a manual follow-up, which shows as a separately confirmed send. Don’t automatically rule out a genuine duplicate, though: the anti-duplicate protection is a first-pass check plus a short, time-limited internal lock, not a permanent marker — if the same ticket is submitted for processing twice at nearly the same moment (a duplicate webhook or retry, for instance) and the first run is slow, a second automatic email is technically possible. If the audit trail shows two automatic sends with no manual one, escalate it rather than closing it as expected behavior.
• If a customer says Mizo asked something it shouldn’t have (technical, environment-specific, or already-known), that’s a fine-tuning conversation, not a bug report — the hard rule against asking about the managed environment is meant to prevent this by default.

Configurable Parameters

Setting: Send pre-assistance questions by email (Workflow) — “Sends a first-response communication by email to gather more information or acknowledge receipt before resolution.”

Additional settings:

• Log time after pre-assistance email — On/Off. When on, sending the email (automatically or manually) also logs a PSA time entry; when off, only the internal follow-up note is created.
• Send emails to the ticket contact (ConnectWise PSA) — an administrator-only preview setting, ConnectWise only. See Per-PSA Differences; it has no effect on HaloPSA or Autotask.

Roles and Permissions

• Configuring the automation level and the ConnectWise-specific setting requires full access to the Workflow page; read-only users can view but not change them.
• Reviewing and manually sending the email (Recommendation level) happens through the chat panel embedded in the ticket view inside the PSA. That panel isn’t gated by a technician’s individual Mizo permission level the way most backoffice actions are — anyone able to open the ticket panel inside the tenant’s PSA can review, edit, and send the email from there.

Troubleshooting / Possible Error Messages

When a technician is reviewing or sending manually (Recommendation), they can see, inside the chat panel:

• “Failed to load conversation. Please try again.” — the composer couldn’t load.
• “Failed to send message. Please try again.” — a message to Mizo inside the composer failed to go through.
• “Cannot send an empty email. Please compose the email content and try again.” — a send was attempted with no email content.
• When a manual send or a booking-link request fails for another reason (for example a missing contact email on the ticket), the composer relays the reason back as conversational text rather than a fixed message — there’s no single consistent error string to search for; read what the assistant says in the composer.

When Mizo decides no questions are needed, this is completely silent — no to-do, no draft, no note, no error. When the automatic email fails to send at Automation level (for example, no contact email on the PSA ticket), the failure is also invisible to anyone looking at the ticket in the normal view — it’s recorded only in Mizo’s internal logs, not shown to a technician or the customer.

Dependencies or Prerequisites

• Requires Mizo’s initial ticket analysis (tech assistance) to have completed for the ticket; it doesn’t run standalone.
• The email needs a resolvable customer contact with an email address on file. If the ticket has no usable contact, the automatic send fails and a manual send reports the reason conversationally in the composer.
• On ConnectWise, sending the email also depends on the ticket having (or Mizo being allowed to temporarily set) the PSA’s own “automatically email the contact” flag — see the “Send emails to the ticket contact” setting and Per-PSA Differences below.
• Optionally offers a Microsoft Bookings scheduling link in the email when that integration is configured for the tenant; without it, the email simply omits the “book a call” option.
• The optional PSA time entry for sending the email depends on the separate “Log time after pre-assistance email” setting.

Concrete Usage Examples

A customer emails in “My laptop won’t connect to Wi-Fi.” Mizo has no record of which laptop and no context on when it started. At Automation, Mizo immediately emails the customer asking which device and when the issue started — before any technician has looked at the ticket.

A customer’s ticket already says “affects only my laptop, started this morning after the update” in the original message. Mizo finds nothing worth asking and stays silent — no to-do, no email, nothing for the technician to review.

A monitoring alert creates a ticket automatically. Mizo recognizes it as machine-generated and doesn’t draft any questions.

Common questions:

• “Did Mizo email our client something wrong?” — Check the audit trail for the ticket’s send event, which records the exact email body that went out and who (or which automated pass) sent it. Mizo can’t ask about anything technical or environment-specific by design, so a wrong or off-topic question is unusual and worth a fine-tuning review rather than assumed to be normal behavior.
• “How do we stop Mizo emailing on certain tickets?” — Set the automation level to Off or Recommendation for that client/location. At Recommendation, nothing is emailed unless a technician actively sends it, so it’s the safer default for sensitive accounts. There’s no per-ticket-type exclusion — the choice is Off, Recommendation, or Automation for the whole client or location.
• “The customer says they got two emails on the same ticket.” — Mizo’s automatic send only fires once, on the ticket’s first pass — a second email usually means a person sent a follow-up manually (or approved one at Recommendation), not a duplicate automatic send. See Best Practices for the rare edge case where a genuine duplicate is possible.

Per-PSA Differences

• Autotask does not support fully automatic email sending. Even with the setting at Automation, Mizo’s automatic pipeline never emails an Autotask ticket’s contact — it only links relevant configuration items and, if enabled separately, posts an internal note. If a technician sends the email manually through the composer, Mizo only creates an internal task note on the ticket; whether that note actually reaches the customer as an email depends entirely on a workflow rule configured on the customer’s Autotask instance, outside Mizo’s control. Don’t promise Automation-level automatic emailing to an Autotask customer.
• ConnectWise sends the email as a ticket discussion note visible to the customer. Because ConnectWise only emails a note to the contact when the ticket’s own “automatically email contact” flag is on at the moment the note is saved, Mizo can optionally toggle that flag on just long enough to save the note (the “Send emails to the ticket contact” preview setting) and restore it immediately after — this only matters for ConnectWise tenants whose tickets don’t already have that flag on by default.
• HaloPSA sends the email natively as an outbound action on the ticket — no extra setting is needed or available.