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:
Each Workflow step has:
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.
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.
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:
Simply click on Quick Add as in the screenshot below.
Every web form you create 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:
<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.
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).
To customize Workflow notifications, navigate to Admin > Customize system emails . There are a number of email templates that you can customize to ensure your Workflow notification appearance is inline with your expectations. These email templates are as below:
| {tag_currentusername} | Name of user currently logged in to site |
| {tag_expirydate} | Expiry date for workflow step |
| {tag_formsummary} | Summary of the web form submitted |
| {tag_objectname} | Name of the item type this workflow step refers to (case, order, webpage, template) |
| {tag_objecturl} | URL to view the item associated with the workflow |
| {tag_objecturlsecure} | Secure URL to view the item associated with the workflow |
| {tag_rejectionreason} | Reason for rejecting task, as entered by Admin |
| {tag_rolename} | Name of the Role the user belongs to |
| {tag_stepname} | Current step of the workflow |
| {tag_workflowname} | Name of the triggered workflow |
You'll need to either update the role responsible within the workflow settings (Admin -> Manage Workflow -> Manage Steps) or remove yourself from the role (Admin -> Manage Users) altogether.
Please check the following;
If you have been entered in the notify by e-mail box, the system then assumes you are not a member of the Admin and as such would not have the ability to log into the backend. Because of this the system then obscures the URL present here and replaces it with a note that this information is not available to you.
Workflow notifications will only include the last file included by a customer. The rest of the items will show up under "Related Files" in the case record of the Admin. So for example, if the customer attaches 3 files to the enquiry, only the last attached file will be added to the workflow.
Also note that only files smaller than 1mb will be attached to the workflows. All files larger than this will need to be viewed within the admin of the site.
Copyright 2004 - 2011 Business Catalyst