Overview
You can automate actions that happen in certain conditions. For example, whenever a payment is due and the event is 3 days away, you can have the system text them and charge their card on file.
Filters to decide who is affected and when
Action to decide what should happen
Available Actions
- Send an email to your company email, sales reps email, or customer.
- Send a text to cell phone of customer, sales rep, or workers.
- Charge the customer's card-on-file to collect balance due (requires Global Payments).
- Set the status of the event.
- Modify the value of a field.
- Check items in and out of Maintenance.
- There is now a send data option to be used with webhooks or any service you would like to send data to. You enter the URL that we should send to and choose a report so we know what data to send. We will hit that URL for each row of the report. Each send will count against the API count for your account.
Duplicate Actions
When setting your actions, you can set how often you want the action performed. Choose between the following:
- 1-10 Times Per Lead: Only perform the action 1 to 10 times per matching lead. In most cases, you will want to only use 1 for this field.
- Once Per Customer: Only perform the action once per matching customer. This is used when you are making an automation dealing with customers instead of leads.
- Once Per Customer of their Leads: This can be used to make sure when you are working with leads that you only trigger the action once for the lead that matches or the customer on that lead. So if we already did the action for another lead of that customer's, we will not perform it again.
Customer related actions are attempted once while lead actions you choose between 1 to 10 times, whether they are successful or not. For example: if an email is sent but not delivered because of a bad email address, or a card is charged but declined, or a status change fails because the lead is already set to that status - if you make the correction to a lead after this occurs the system will still not automatically re-try. But, if you are performing on a lead and set it to try more than once, it may work properly on a subsequent run.
Frequency
Automations will check every 15 minutes for automated actions that need to take place, but this can be changed if requested. If you have setup a lead to be changed more than one time, you likely will want to set your frequency larger or pay careful attention to your filter to make sure it isn't caught again the next time automations run. For example, it's possible to run your automation to email someone 10 times in the course of a couple hours when you don't intend that. One day of minutes (frequency = 1440) is a common frequency setting. Any changes you make to an automation or a filter being used by an automation is subject to an approval process.
Approval
In order to protect the user and the integrity of the service, we require our staff approve any automation that affects more than 50 items when created or modified. Our staff is alerted and processes these as soon as possible.
Multi-Location Accounts
Automations will only run on leads belonging to the same location as the Automation.
Common Examples
- Charge balance day before event
This only works if you're using Global Payments merchant services and only works if we have the card on file (such as they paid the deposit or paid on a previous event). This one requires two automatons to be created, and they must be in this order. The first one does the charging, and the 2nd one is optional if you want someone to get notified of any failures. Successful charge notifications are already handled by the Customer - Payment Received and Alerts: Payment Made.
Automation 1: Charge Card - Balance
Filter: Event Date next 1 day, Status: Confirmed, Balance Due greater than 0, has CC on file
Action: Charge card: balance due
Automation 2: Charge Card - Notify of Failure
Filter: [filter should be same as in Automation 1]
Action: Email - Card Declined
Other recommendations: You might want to have your Payment Reminder email come after the automation attempt. You might want your Deposit Received email to let them know that the balance will be auto-charged.
- Email and Text customer day before event
If you want to remind your customer 24 hours prior to event start date. Note: Action 2 here will send an email and work exactly the same as the Customer - Event Reminder email, so you'll only need it active in one place.
Filter: Event Date next 1 day, Status: Confirmed
Action 1: Text - Reminder - we'll be there at *setupstart* tomorrow!
Action 2: Email - Event Reminder
*Note: In order to use text message reminders with automations you must first be setup and using IO Phone to have this feature available.
- Downgrade status if deposit is not paid within 3 days of booking
This is helpful if you have a policy where you only reserve the equipment for a few days without payment.
Filter: Book Date over 3 days ago, Status: Hold/Contracted, pay: 0
Action: Set Status: Quote or Cancelled
- When Setting up Text automations keep in mind there are text limitations:
200 text segments per hour. 300 text segments per day. Text segments are every 160 characters. Any automated text that tries to send to over 500 recipients, will be flagged for review by IO.