What is RingCentral Workflow Builder? A Beginner’s Guide
What is RingCentral Workflow Builder? A Beginner’s Guide
RingCentral’s recent addition, Intelligent Workflow Builder, allows customers, even non-developers, to create custom workflows with no programming required. These custom workflows are built to assist businesses and lighten their workloads by automating processes.
What are these processes?
Processes in the world of business can be a lot of things. For this scenario, the RingCentral Workflow Builder can accommodate numerous SMS inquiries for you. The goal of the Intelligent Workflow Builder is to manage your communication workflow needs, making it easier for you to focus on other avenues of your business or your personal life.
How to use the pre-built templates in the RingCentral Workflow Builder
To make things easier, RingCentral provides pre-built templates within the Workflow Builder that could help you get started. These pre-built templates can serve as a guide to assist you create a quick custom solution depending on your needs.
For example: If you’re running a community clinic and you still keep on receiving text messages even after the business hours, you can use the “After-hours SMS auto-replies” template to send automated text message responses to your patients. You may set up your custom responses to:
- [Business name] is already closed. We will resume our regular business hours, 7:00am — 4:30pm, Monday to Saturday.
- Thanks for reaching out to [business name]! Our clinic’s business hours are Monday to Friday, 7:00am — 4:30pm. We’ll get back to you within one business day.
To use these pre-built templates, just go to automator.labs.ringcentral.com and login with your RingCentral account.
Click “New automation” and you will be able to see the different pre-built templates you can choose from.
Whether you like to set up a custom workflow builder whenever you are not in the office or set up an SMS opt-in/opt-out auto reply, you can create and edit these pre-built templates in less than an hour. You just have to input some key details such as your business contact information, schedule, and custom message you want your recipients to receive, then you are good to go.
Read: Using Workflow Builder to reply when out-of-office
How to create your own workflow
If you want to create your own workflow, upon clicking “New automation”, you will see the “Build your own workflow” below the pre-built templates. There you can start from scratch and set different triggers and build custom branches based on your preferred command.
By building your own custom workflow, you can personalize the commands based on your communication needs, whereas choosing to edit the pre-built templates might limit the actions you want to manage. Although choosing pre-built templates has its perks, you can save more time by editing them instead of starting from scratch.
Set up the frequency of your automations
When you want the recipients to only receive one automated response from you, you can edit this in your automation or by editing the trigger associated with an advanced workflow. You can set this as many as you would like to limit how frequently an automation is run whether by number of times or number of days.
Let’s make an example: Based on Figure 4, the automation that we set up here is the “Out-of-office SMS replies”. Let’s say that you are on leave for a couple of days and you want to reply once or twice per day to tell them that you are on PTO. You may want to do this if you want to manage your finances, considering there is a cost to each text message that you send. Because if there are multiple customers texting you, you can save money by limiting the automated responses to one instead of sending out automated responses to each SMS you receive.
Related topic: Responding SMS Opt-In/Out with RingCentral Workflow Builder
How to enable and disable automations
Once you are done with your custom workflow, you will be prompted to enable the automation you created. When your automation is enabled, it will start receiving and responding to events that trigger its execution. Having the option to toggle your automation on and off is important, as you can manage it more easily without having to delete its core setup.
Note: The automation must be disabled when you want to edit your workflow. This will prevent any unsaved changes from happening. With that being said, your automated workflow will not be responding to any events while you are editing your automation.
Testing your automated workflow
To successfully run an automation, you have to try it out first. To test your automated workflow, simply click the “Save & Test” button after you finalize your edits. You will then be prompted with a form that contains all the data associated with the automation’s triggering event. After filling out the form, click test to see a summary of the test’s results.
There you have it! You have created your first automated workflow. If you want to learn more about RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder, you can watch a simple workflows video tutorial on the RingCentral Resource Center page. You may also visit the Workflow Builder page on the RingCentral Developers website to know more about its features, tutorials, and how to get started.
