Creating Automations with the New Admin Features
RingCentral’s Automator empowers customers and developers to design personalized workflows triggered by various events within the RingCentral platform, such as receiving a text message, missing a phone call, or receiving a new voicemail — using an intuitive drag and drop interface and without having to write a single line of code. With RingCentral Automator, you have the flexibility to respond to any or all of these triggers with individual actions or even more intricate multi-step workflows.
Currently, in beta, RingCentral Automator even offers user-friendly admin features to help businesses create commands or templates particularly to cater inquiries from customers. For instance, you can create automation on behalf of someone in your company that needs auto responses when they’re on leave or simply out of the office.
Using the New Admin Features of RingCentral Automator
RingCentral Automator lets you automate much of what you respond to your customers. RingCentral Automator is a low-code no-code developer tool — meaning you don’t have to know complicated programming or script languages to create automations. With the new admin features, you can now use admin extensions when creating automations.
How do you create these automations?
For Super Admins or single-users, you can log in with your RingCentral credentials at this web address https://workflow.labs.ringcentral.com.
Figure 1 — Single-user user interface
Once you’re in, you can see this single-user user interface (UI) where you can create an automation (for Super Admins, a different interface will be shown on screen and will be presented later in the article). Hover over at the upper right area and select “New automation”.
Figure 2 — Pre-built Automator templates
In Figure 2, you can see that some of the templates are disabled because I have not yet completed the carrier required registration in order to send or receive SMS. Once I have completed that registration and SMS is enabled, the grayed out templates would become available.. To see an example of an SMS template, you can refer to this article on how to set up an automation template such as “Missed call auto-response”.
The key to building automation for admins
Intuitively, users often want to attach automation to the main company number because that is what people call. You can use various admin extensions to guide you when you’re building automation — however, the key is that you have to know how the call is being routed through your network so you’d know which admin extension to attach your automation to.
For example, when someone calls the main company number, but no one is there to answer, you want to send an SMS saying someone will call them back. You might conclude that you want to set up a missed call automation for the main company number, but you need to open the admin console to see what extension a caller may be forwarded to. For example, calls may be routed to a call queue or a specific department’s extension. In this case, the automation needs to be associated with the call queue, not the main company number.
Tip: Refer to this RingCentral Community thread to learn how to send SMS messages from the main company number.
What are the admin use cases of RingCentral Automator?
There are a couple of benefits to using automation in your business: that is to create easier workflows and eliminate repetitive manual tasks so that you can proceed to perform the more important ones.
Let’s talk about the use cases that admins can do, such as creating automation on behalf of someone else. For example, if you’re a personal assistant for your company’s CEO, and the CEO is too busy to open or respond to all of his messages or voicemails, you can create automation on their behalf that can automatically respond to the inquiries that say, “Thank you for reaching out to me. I’m a little bit busier than usual, so it might take a little more time to respond. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Cheers!”
Another scenario is the CEO is going away for a two-day vacation. You can set up an automation that can automatically respond to the CEO’s missed phone calls and say, “I’m sorry I missed your call. I’m currently on vacation and was unable to answer at the time. If you could please leave me a message or shoot me an email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”. Those are two examples of managing a person’s automation.
What are some admin use cases for managing a phone system?
- Missed call auto-replies for call queues
- SMS keyword auto-reply
- After-hours auto-replies
Figure 3 — After-hours auto-replies
With RingCentral Automator it’s easy to manage after-office-hours auto-replies — this is an example where you can attach automation to the admin extensions. As you can see from the Figure 4 image, you can manually set up your office hours. Any calls from people that come through after closing time will get an automated response that might say “Thank you for your call. Your call has been noted and my assistant will text back to you soon.”.
What is the difference between a single user and an admin user?
If you are a single user, you can only create and edit your own automation. Admin users can load anyone’s automation into their UI, and they have access to all of RingCentral Automator’s admin extensions to which they can attach an automation. RingCentral Automator even supports call queue, IVR, park location, and voicemail extensions.
Automations created for extensions can be found within the left hand navigation of the RingCentral Automator interface:
Figure 4 — Admin user interface
However, an important note is that any automations created for the added user will not be enabled until the user accepts the invite to join or sign up for Automator.
How does one become an admin?
You can request an admin role or admin access through the person or team who manages your RingCentral subscription. If you have additional questions, our support team is here to help.
Bottom Line
RingCentral Automator allows you to create or program your own custom workflow without writing any code. You don’t have to go through complicated steps to successfully build your own automation, as RingCentral Automator was created to have simple tools and become accessible for many, such as business owners.
Best of all, most users can access the RingCentral Automator and start building custom workflows regardless of whether or not you have an admin account. Try out RingCentral Automator by logging in with your RingCentral Account at https://workflow.labs.ringcentral.com.
To learn more about RingCentral Automator’s Admin features, check out the Admin guide under the Help section inside the RingCentral Automator app.
