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What manual processes have you transformed into automations?

  • 23 June 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 290 views

Notify teammates based on tag

 

One of the things I love to work on with customers and our own team is how to automate our manual processes so that we free up our time to do bigger and better things. I’ve joked with one of my teammates, Jason (technical support engineer), that we want to automate our jobs away. That’s not the end, of course — automation would be a means to evolve our own jobs to work on even more impactful things. (BTW @jason, I’d love if you could share an example of an automation you’ve built that has saved our support team from the manual actions we used to be tied to!)

To our fellow Front users, please share some of your processes that you’ve turned from manual to automatic. Or, share something you’d like to automate — the rest of us can share tips or how we’ve achieved it.

In the meantime, I can share a nifty little rule that our Education team uses — we have surveys at the end of every Front Academy course, which learners can fill out and the results get sent to our Education inbox. We want to ensure all teammates see these so that we keep a pulse on our learners’ sentiments, rather than one person seeing it in the shared inbox and then archiving it. 

Before this rule, each person may have needed to click into the Education inbox to read the messages, leave them there unarchived, and develop some kind of system to indicate that everyone has read the message. Now, we have a rule that will notify each person whenever we receive a survey, which allows us to quickly clear out the shared inbox by archiving all the surveys because we don’t need to worry about who still needs to read the responses.

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Note: If your rule templates look a bit different, that’s because we’re rolling out an updated design that hasn’t gotten to you yet, but you can still recreate the above rules using your templates. The design is slightly different, but all the elements are the same.

As you can see, the rule above requires that the conversation have the Survey tag, which means this is actually a two-part workflow with the rule above being the second, notifying, part. The first part of the workflow would be the rule that adds the Survey tag to these notification emails:

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This tagging rule is a special type of rule called a rule set, where you can add all the various tag-based-on-content key words you’d like into the table so that you can manage all the tags of this type in a single place. Once your conversations are tagged, you can build many, many more workflows on top of them, such as the notification rule above.

3 replies

Lemuel
Userlevel 2
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Thanks for sharing Helena! Similarly, I also find a lot of value utilizing rule sets to automate assignments quickly and reduce manual triage work in our shared inboxes.

I’m a member of the Support Operations team at Front. As we continue to strive for customer-centricity and enhance cross-team efficiency at scale, we needed a better-streamlined process between our Support and Product team to capture and act upon user feedback effectively.

With the implementation of required tagging, our Support agents will tag and classify every customer requests in our Support shared inboxes into different category of the product (i.e. Front’s mobile app). This tag data helps us capture customer support trends and common issues Front users may struggle with.

In conjunction with this tag data via required tagging, I created a rule that will auto assign customer feedback to the Product Manager (teammate) who owns that component of Front.

Auto assign conversation to the respective PM when conversation is moved to the Product inbox and has specific category tag



When a user provides product feedback, the Support agent apply the relevant category tag (via required tagging rule), then move it to the Product shared inbox for the Product team to triage and assign to the right person to capture the feedback.

However, we can automate this by creating a rule set to auto assign the feedback to the PM based on which category tag was added to the conversation.

This is an example rule set where the conversation would be automatically assigned to the respective Product Manager if it contains any of the following category tags. 

Rule Set showing which tags corresponds to and will assign to which teammate/Product Manager (names changed to generic title)


As a result, we can quickly pass user feedback to the subject matter expert/Product Manager to review without relying on one teammate to review each email, and manually assign or @mention the relevant SME/PM.

Happy to help!
jessica_d

I love some of the previously shared examples! As a member of our Onboarding Team here at Front, I also love to find ways to automate manual processes for my team and the many customers I work with. I always say if we can clear bottlenecks in processes and overall reduce the number of clicks for the team to get their job done, that’s always a win!

I figure I can share an example of one of our current automated processes that previously was manual. We often get requests for onboarding engagement from other internal teams. We have a process in place today to have them submit these requests through Salesforce which generates an email to our Shared Inbox. Within Front, we have built an automation that helps route these requests equally amongst the team. We’ve been able to make sure all requests get evenly distributed all while saving the team time by eliminating the need to manually keep tabs on who got what request or having to go to the shared inbox to assign out each request manually. Our rule not only helps assign out requests in an equal round-robin fashion, but the rule also tags these requests for analytics purposes as well as notifies our team manager for visibility!

 

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ellis_rost
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I'm truly impressed by the fantastic examples shared here! As new SDR at Front, I'm passionate about streamlining and automating manual processes to enhance efficiency, not only for our team but also for the numerous customers we collaborate with. In my opinion, the key to success lies in minimizing the number of clicks required for a team or individual to accomplish their tasks.

 

Allow me to share a very basic example of a automated process I've implemented, known as the 'SFDC Rule.' This rule has helped my ability to reach inbox zero while still receiving multiple spam emails a day from the salesforce. Previously, we relied on manual archiving, which was time-consuming and often neglected.

 

With the SFDC Rule in place, when an inbound message is received from '@supprt@salesforce.com,' Front takes the initiative to automatically archive the conversation. This simple yet powerful rule ensures that these messages don't clutter our inbox, allowing us to maintain a clean and organized workspace.

 

In essence, the SFDC Rule has significantly enhanced my ability to reach inbox zero, saving us precious time and ensuring that every request is handled efficiently. It's a testament to how automation can streamline operations and empower our team to deliver exceptional results.

 

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