Workflow
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Understanding Workflows
Keeping connected with your online business is incredibly important - it's like a living, breathing entity, and you need to know when things happen. That's where workflows come in. Workflows are set up to notify you by Email or even SMS when something happens. That "something" can be a case is submitted, or a web page has been edited and must be approved, or an order has been received from the shopping cart.
Workflows allow you to automate and streamline your business, including your customer service, enabling you to notify system users of various events, and require approval or input at certain steps of the process.
A Workflow is a series of steps that are triggered by various events, such as:
- A customer enquiring online
- A customer placing an order online
- A customer making a booking online
- A change made to a web pages content (by a user)
Each Workflow step has:
- A group of people (a Role) that is notified via Email or SMS.
- One of these people may need to approve the step before the workflow proceeds to the next step
- A period of time that the task should be completed within (Task Duration)
- A period of time that should elapse before reminding the Role to complete the task
- A period of time to wait before escalating the issue, after the Task Duration Expires.
- A group of people (a Role) that the task is escalated to after the escalation grace period expires.
Workflow Concepts
There are several key concepts that must be understood when working with workflows. Your understanding of the building blocks of workflows makes it even easier to leverage one of the most useful and powerful features of our platform.
Here's a quick rundown.
- Users are linked to a Role.
- Roles are a logical grouping of Users that tells us the permissions that the user has.
- Workflow is set to notify a Role in each of its steps. Thus it notifies all of the Users in that Role.
- Control Category on anything in the system links it to the Workflows associated with that Category.
So if your web form is in the category "Customer Enquiry" then workflows linked to that category will be launched when that form is submitted.
An Example:
Imagine we have a Role called "Sales". All of your salespeople are in this role. We set up a Workflow that
notifies the Role "Sales" people via SMS (NOTE: if your workflow step is an SMS step, then each User in the
Role must have a mobile phone number in their details.). We then link the Workflow to a Category
called "Sales Enquiry".When we build our web form to capture our customer enquiries, we attach it
to the Category "Sales Enquiry".Now, when the customer submits the form, the Workflow is started, which notifies
the "Sales" Role of the customer enquiry by SMSing the Users in that role.
Creating a Workflow
To create a workflow, go to Admin -> Manage Workflows, and click Create a New Workflow. Give the workflow a name and click Save. If you would like this workflow to be triggered when a new order is made via the Online Shop, check the Orders check box.
Adding a workflow step
Click on the Add steps to this workflow, and start defining the workflow steps. After giving the step a Task Name, select the Role Responsible who should be notified for this task. Then select a Role for Escalate To Role, and how the role should be notified via SMS or Email.
If the task requires someone to take action and approve the step as complete, ensure Must Approve checkbox is selected. If it is checked, then you must decide on your Task Duration, Remind Before Expiry and Escalate After Expiry. These time periods help you manage service level agreements (SLAs) with customers, and also help you manage your internal business processes.
If you check Also Send a Workflow Notification To then you can enter some email addresses of people external to the system (i.e. non-users). Who should be notified of the event that triggered the workflow. You can add multiple addresses using a semicolon (;) as a divider.
Finally, you can Send Workflow Message to Customer. This will email the content that you enter to the customer that is associated with the case. This is not automatic you need to add the customer to the 3rd party notifications list. This is done under the customers case. But once you add the customer to the 3rd party notifications list as your workflow progress through its steps, the customer is notified with a custom message. For example a finance company who is approving a loan application for a customer may use this to keep the customer in the loop as the loan approval process progresses internally. Customer may receive the following emails:
- Weve received your loan application
- Weve reviewed that all required information is there
- Loan currently with credit department
- Loan approved by credit department now forwarded to loan manager
- Your loan has been approved.
Simply click on Quick Add as in the screenshot below.
Launching different workflows depending on enquiry type
Every Web Form you created can be configured to use a workflow. A workflow is a business process that is launched when the web form is submitted. For example if you are a Cleaning Company and a customer fills in your Get-a-Quote web form, you may want to notify the service department via SMS and Email, and also notify management by email. You may also want to escalate this to management should the enquiry not be completed in a timely manner. This is a typical workflow that you would attach to this web form. Keep in mind that workflows are completely customizable.
Now imagine the same cleaning company growing to great heights where now they have 100s of franchisees. It becomes unrealistic for all enquiries made from the same Get-a-Quote web form to be sent to the service department at the head office. It makes much more sense to send enquiries to the relevant franchisees depending on where the customer is located and which franchisee services that location.
Implementing this type of functionality is relatively easy and will significantly improve the way your business operates. To get started:
- Create a number of Workflows via Admin -> Manage Workflows. Each workflow should notify the relevant staff at each franchisee. Each workflow may also include a step to notify the head office.
- Write down the system ID of each workflow (this is displayed in the blue bar when creating or editing a workflow)
- Go to the web page that contains a web form that you wish to implement this functionality for
- View the source of the web form and add the following code to your web form:
<select name="WorkflowList">
<option value=ID1>Workflow 1 Name</option>
<option value=ID2>Workflow 2 Name</option>
<option value=ID3>Workflow 3 Name</option>
</select>
In this example you would replace Workflow 1 Name and alike to the locations services by franchisees. ID1 through to ID3 must be replaced with the system ID that you collected earlier.
e.g.
<select name="WorkflowList">
<option value=123>City Center</option>
<option value=124>City North</option>
<option value=125>City South</option>
</select>
In the above implementation when a customer fills in a web form, they will also be presented with a drop down that will ask them to choose where they are located. When the web form is submitted depending on the location the customer chose, the relevant workflow will be launched. This will only notify the franchisee that services that location.
Notifying customers of a workflow step
You can notify customers of a workflow by selection 'Send workflow notification to Customer' option.
Simply check the box, and type the message you would like to send for this step, as shown here -
Now, each time a workflow is triggered you need to add the customer to the workflow before they recieve a message. To do so, go to the Customer record under Customers and click "view customer cases". Then, click on the case that initiated the workflow, and click on "workflows" along the top of the screen.
Now click "Quick Add". The customer will be notified only of the steps that you checked in the workflow information described above.
You can also fully customise the email that is sent out by the system, by modifying the Layout of the '3rd party notification email' as shown here -
This allows you to use the workflow process to keep the sites customers notified as their request is actioned. This can be as simple as a response when their application for secure zone membership has been approved, or as complex as notifications of the various steps after a customer has submitted an application form of some kind (maybe a loan / job application webform or the like).
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