Using Workflow Builder to reply when out of office

In the following tutorial I’ll show you how you can respond to a received Team Messaging chat with an out of office (OOO) reply with the help of the RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder™. This can all be accomplished without having to write any complex programming code, or any code at all!

To get started, after you log into Workflow Builder you will be taken to the dashboard area that lists all your existing workflows. Click on “New Automation” in the top right of the display to start creating your new workflow. See figure 1.

Figure 1 — Creating a new workflow

The first thing to do in this workflow is to set the starting Trigger. Once you select the “New automation” button and you choose to “Build your own workflow” you will be asked to define a new Trigger for the workflow. Select “Chat message received” and click “Add”.

You will then be taken to the Workflow Builder’s editor area where you can further build out your workflow. The next thing you want your workflow to perform is to send an auto-reply to the sender that you are out of the office. Click on the “+” symbol after the Trigger and pick “Add action” from the pop up menu. Select “Trigger — Team ID” from the dropdown selection list and then add in the text for the message that you want to send back to the person that was trying to message you. You should see something like Figure 2.

Figure 2 — Defining the Team Messenger OOO response.

Once you are satisfied with the message, click save. That is really all there is to it!

When this workflow is enabled you will have an auto-reply message sent out every time someone contacts you on Team Messenger. You may want to fine tune the Trigger however to set a filter on it for sending out the auto-reply only once per hour or once per day; whatever best suits your situation. Figure 3 shows the repetition control option on the Trigger display.

Figure 3 — Setting some controls on the initial workflow Trigger

You can also add filters for a date range to set when the workflow is active if you want it to be restricted to certain days or times.

Another option you might consider is to send yourself an SMS message when chat messages come in for you so that you can see what they contain. You can then choose to ignore them if you want to and respond to the ones that are truly important and may be demanding your attention. To add in the SMS part, again, you need to click on the “+” under the last Action of the workflow and select “Add action” from the pop up menu. Choose “Send SMS” from the list of available actions and you should see a display like that shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 — Adding an SMS note-to-self to the workflow

With the help of the “#” list pop up you can add in data points from the environment that RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder knows about. In our case we added the entire chat message to our SMS body so that the chat message can be seen. Be sure to save and test your workflow before you enable it; make it live.

When the workflow is enabled the message sender will see this as an auto-response, just as designed.

Having RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder being able to do so many repetitive tasks is a great time saver. Being able to get valuable time back from tasks that can be automated in this way will prove to be very important.

You can try out Workflow Builder yourself and play with its many potential scenarios by going here and logging in with your RingCentral account or you can read more about the platform here.