Featurecast Story 6 - Workflows

IM'ing (Instant Messaging) Feature Story Series

Featurecast Story 6 - Workflows

Make it easy with workflows

Zoho Desk's instant messaging functionality includes the ability to automate and simplify the customer support process. Workflows allow you to create customizable actions and write custom functions to automate your repetitive support workflows, reducing the manual workload for your team.

What is a workflow?

A workflow is a series of sequential tasks to execute a business process.

An example would be sending a customer timely updates on the status of their orders. In this workflow, after the customer orders a product, they would receive confirmation when the order is accepted and updates during the delivery process. Based on the set criteria and trigger points, the customer would be kept up-to-date on where their product is and when they'll receive it.

Workflow automation

Workflow automation is a technique that streamlines and optimizes business processes by using technology to automatically route tasks and information between systems and business users in an organization.

With workflow automation, businesses can save time, increase efficiency, and reduce errors by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks and ensuring workflow consistency.

Benefits of workflow automation

   •    Reduced errors
   •    Accelerated service delivery
   •    Enhanced consistency and control
   •    Improved business processes
   •    Increased productivity

Desk's custom actions gallery lets you add workflow actions in addition to alerts, tasks, field updates, skills, and custom functions that are available by default. All you need to do is specify the required actions and their values to add the action to your workflow rule.

The two IM custom actions that can be associated with workflow rules are:

Notify via the Instant Messaging module: Send a message (notification) to the customer through the configured IM channels. This rule will only notify the customer, and the message will not be appended to the conversation sub-tab in the ticket module.

Reply via the Instant Messaging module: Send a message (reply) to customers through the configured IM channels. This message will also be appended to the conversation sub-tab in the ticket module.

Think carefully about whether your processes are ready for automation. It makes sense to automate a workflow when:

You have a series of repetitive tasks that need to be completed regularly.
The workflow is critical, and tasks must be achieved accurately and efficiently.
Automation can significantly improve the execution time or output quality.

I hope you found this article helpful and try the workflow feature to streamline manual tasks and make your team more efficient!

There's more to come. Please watch this space for more IM feature stories. 

Until next time,

 Kavya Rao

 The Zoho Desk team

Zoho Desk Resources

Desk Community Learning Series
Digest
Functions
Meetups
Kbase
Resources
Glossary
Desk Marketplace
MVP Corner
Word of the Day

Topic Participants
Kavya Rao Addepalli

Sticky Posts
Zoho Desk Virtual Meetup: US Central, October 5 - 7, 2021
After the interactive Virtual Meetups in the other regions, we are starting with the US Central and Midwest regions from October 5 to October 7, 2021. The dates for other regions will be announced soon. At this event, we will explore the topics which
Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community
With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features
Ask the Experts 10: A 5-hour online Q&A on Zoho Desk Best Practices
Welcome to Zoho Desk's Ask the Experts session! This is a monthly discussion on our forums; wherein a panel of experts will take on questions specific to topics related to Zoho Desk. The panel will be available for a 5-hour period and will answer any questions posted here. Let's begin the year learning some best practices from our experts. In this month's ATE we are opening the floor to questions on how to use Zoho Desk the best way. If you have a business use case but not sure if Workflow is
Share your Zoho Desk story with us!
Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge.
Ask the Experts 7: A 5-hour online Q&A on Telephony and Call Module
Welcome to Ask the Experts session! This is a monthly discussion in forums; each session, a panel of experts will take questions on specific topics related to Zoho Desk. The panel will be available for a 5-hour period and answer any questions posted here. In this month's Ask the Experts, we will take questions on everything related to Telephony and the Call Module in Zoho Desk. We will discuss the following aspects: Integration with different Telephony vendors Routing calls to agents Converting