The match mode tells the panel how to look for your keyword inside the incoming text. Here is the difference between contains, whole word, starts with and exact match.
Your keyword is "price" but the customer writes "what are your prices 🙂". The match mode is the setting that decides whether those two count as the same thing. Triggers built without understanding the four options either never fire or fire on every message they should have ignored.
💡 The Match field appears on three triggers: Keyword, Post comment and . The default is .
The mode decides where your word is looked for inside the incoming text. From the narrowest to the widest:
Exact match — The whole text must equal the word. "price" fires only on a message that says nothing but "price"; "price?" also works, but "what is the price" does not.
Starts with — The text must begin with the word. "price" fires on "price list please" but not on "do you have a price list".
Whole word — The word must appear as a separate word. "price" fires on "do you have a price list" but not on "pricing", because there the word is "pricing".
Contains — The word may appear anywhere, even in the middle of another word. "price" fires on "pricing", "prices" and "do you have a price list" alike.
Because suffixes change the ending of words, Contains is the right choice most of the time: "price", "prices" and "pricing" are all caught by a single entry. Whole word earns its place with short words that hide inside longer ones: searching for "buy" with Contains also fires on "buyer" and "buying"; Whole word prevents that.
Letter case, Turkish letters and accents
Matching is always case-insensitive and accent-insensitive. There is no setting to turn that off, and you do not need one.
Before the comparison, both your keyword and the incoming text go through these steps:
Letters are lowercased. Turkish rules apply, so İ → i and I → ı. Because the customer may be typing on an English keyboard, the generic lowercase form is tried as well, which makes "INFO", "info", "İNFO" and "ınfo" one and the same.
Turkish letters are simplified: ç = c, ğ = g, ı = i, ö = o, ş = s, ü = u.
Circumflexed and accented letters are simplified too: â = a, î = i, û = u, é = e.
So "ŞİFRE", "Sifre", "şifre" and "sıfre" are one word. There is no reason to add the same word again in its other spellings; that only makes your list longer.
Punctuation, emoji and spaces
Before the comparison, characters that are neither letters nor digits are stripped from the beginning and the end of the text: punctuation, quotation marks and emoji. Repeated spaces in the middle collapse into one.
The most visible effect is in Exact match. With "price" set to exact match, all of these still fire:
price?
price
price 🙂
"price"
Punctuation inside the word is not stripped, so a message saying "pri-ce" does not match "price".
⚠️ Note: an empty text, or one made only of spaces, matches no mode at all. When someone sends just a photo the text is empty; to catch that message use the Any message trigger.
What happens with several words
A trigger holds up to 30 words, and all of them are searched with the same mode. You cannot pick a mode per word; add a second trigger for words that need a different one.
Words are tried in list order and the first one that matches wins. The winning word is written into the session log, so the Logs tab tells you which word fired. That is the easiest way to measure which of several words in one flow is actually doing the work.
An entry may also hold a phrase of several words, for example track order. Phrases work in every mode; in Whole word mode the words of the phrase must appear next to each other in the same order. track order fires on "track order number" but not on "tracking my order".
Which mode to choose
A concrete example: a fashion boutique wants to answer its DMs.
Words that take endings, like size, stock, shipping → Contains. It still fires on "sizes", "in stock?" and "have you shipped it".
Short words like buy, new, fit → Whole word. Otherwise every message that contains them inside another word fires.
Campaign codes like SALE10 → Exact match. The code is written on its own; it should not open the campaign when it appears inside a sentence.
Structured messages starting with order no → Starts with. It fires on "order no 4821" but not when "order no" turns up mid-conversation.
The mode you choose is also a priority. When several triggers match the same event the narrower one wins, and the mode is scored like this: exact match 4, whole word 3, starts with 2, contains 1. So an exact-match "SALE10" always beats a contains trigger on "sale". The full scoring is in how triggers work.
Common mistakes
Using a whole sentence as a keyword. A phrase like "could you send me the price list" only fires when written word for word. Shorten it.
Giving a single word exact match. Most customers write the word inside a sentence, and the trigger quietly never runs.
Adding both spellings of the same word. You do not need to; accent-insensitivity already covers it.
Expecting the mode to apply to excluded words. The Excluded words list on the comment trigger is always searched with "contains"; your chosen mode does not affect it.
Putting the same word in both the match and the exclude list. The trigger can then never fire, and the pre-publish check reports it as a warning.
Once the mode is set, type a few real customer sentences into the simulator on the Test tab: the simulator uses the same rule as the engine, so what matches there matches live.