Good morning, everyone and welcome to today’s webinar on understanding automations. Now we’ve got quite a lot to cover off in the webinar today. The topic of automations is not necessarily a simple one. It’s one that can quite often cause people a little bit of alarm and distress at the thought of automating processes in the business. So, what we’re going to do today is look at some of the key benefits in introducing automations in your processes. We’re going to look at some of the fundamental things in the Zigaflow account that you should ensure are set up and optimised, ready for introducing automations. We’ll look at some of the simple things you can automate and how they behave in the system. Like we say, automation can be a bit daunting, so if anyone has any questions now, please fire them through in the chat and we’ll get to your questions once we have done a bit of a run through. Similarly, if anyone needs to dive in a little bit more and wants some more support and assistance from us with looking at what you could actually automate, get in touch and we will more than happily spend some time with you getting that working.
So, there’s really five key benefits to the business in terms of introducing automations. One is, you’re going to get more done. If you take away manual tasks and manual aspects of processes, it’s work that people are not having to do, ultimately letting you get more done as a business. The other aspect to this is that you are simplifying your processes and reducing the amount of manual interaction points. You don’t have to eliminate everything, it’s just a case that there are certain things that you might not want to keep doing, because you do it a hundred times a day, and its cumbersome. As a result of simplifying your processes, you reduce human error, you’ll also find that recruitment and training new members of staff becomes easier because you’ve got simpler processes to follow. This makes it a lot easier when you’re bringing new people into the company, you don’t necessarily need people with the same level of experience to fulfil roles because you are building certain automations into what you do. The other key benefit within this is it can massively help to improve customer relationships. If you just take a step back from your own business for a few moments and think about being on the opposite of the transaction. As a business, you’re selling product services to your customers, think of times when you have been sat as a customer and some of the best experiences you have had. You’ve probably had email notifications from companies, keeping you up to date with the progress of your order. You have potentially had some communication from them regarding what they are doing for you and upcoming visits etc. You have probably felt very much kept in the loop with what is actually going on. This is just one small kind of automation that you have probably been on the receiving end of. For customers, it creates predictability, they know when they deal with you, this is exactly what is going to happen. Having your processes lined out and aspects of it automated makes it a lot easier from a sales perspective because you can promise customers what the service is going to be like, and deliver it exactly as expected with perhaps less reliance on people. People make a massive impact on the company, but this is about taking away repetitive work and allowing team members to focus on more productive, high value input into the process environment.
We’re going to have a look at the Zigaflow system, some of the terminology in here might be slightly different to what you are used to seeing in your account. As many of you are aware, we can rename areas in the system to suit the terminology you are familiar with. Like I say, if anyone is unsure of anything, please do send a question through in the chat or get some time booked in and we will run through things with you on one on one.
In order to get the most from the automations, it’s really important to ensure that certain aspects of the system are set up in the best way to facilitate what it is you want to achieve. I would say with regards to processes, sometimes before diving into stuff with system configuration, it’s worth taking a step back. There is an online tool that we use quite frequently called draw.io, which is a drag and drop process map builder, some of you may be familiar with this. It is worthwhile getting a visual picture of what you want your processes to look like. This then gives you an idea of what variables come into play, quite often they refer to them in process mapping as decisions. For instance, an order comes in. Is it an account customer? Yes, do this, or no, do that. All these types of branches on process maps tend to determine how things would need to be set up in the system. If you spend a bit of time doing this, you can liaise with us, and we can help shed some light on it and perhaps bat some ideas around.
Some of the things we would say to consider having set up in the system before you start this off are things like your business types. This is one of the things that can be renamed in the system, it comes out of the box as business types, but we have found people will refer to it as divisions or sectors. It could be the difference between working with commercial clients and residential clients. The business types serve two functions, one is it is a way for you to segregate what you are looking at from a reporting perspective at the back end. Also, the business types are a condition that comes into automation rules, which we will look at shortly.
Considering which type of business or order it is, does it have a different process? If that is the case, it is worthwhile setting up the business type in here as a precursor before starting anything in the automations.
The other areas to ensure you have set up correctly are each of the modules, which has the ability to have your statuses and all the steps in your processes laid out, and you can set out all your global statuses here. Some customers won’t be using these, or need to, but you have got the ability to break those steps down into workflows, which are essentially sub processes. For instance, if you did installations for customers, you might have your overall process broken down into several workflows. You might have the overall processes and workflow, moving into the production workflow, moving into the QA workflow, moving into an installation workflow. Again, it could be that you do repair work. So, you’ll have a workflow set up for repair jobs and you have another workflow set up for installation jobs because the steps in those processes are going to be different. Again, it’s about ensuring these things are set up and there are guides in the system under this little purple badge here, where you’ll get more insight on how these are used and how to set them up. But again, you are not on your own, talk to us, we will happily take you through this. So, making sure all those statuses are set out as well as your workflows beforehand is really worthwhile.
The other things to consider are the order tags, some of you won’t be using these yet as they are a relatively new addition to the system. These are essentially like tags, markers or flags that you can allocate to specific record types on the system. They could be used to filter things out on the system, but they can also be used as indicators of what something is, if it is high priority for example. It is just a way to put colour coded markers on the records, so that when you are in pipeline view, you have a really clear view of what is going on. They come into play with the automations as well, which is why we are covering this now. You might not need to use these, which is fine, we are just giving you ideas to consider prior to jumping in with the automations.
There are three other key areas that are worth looking at prior to doing this. One is customer tags, similar to order tags, which you can put on customer level records. You can see some examples of this here. It could be stuff about payment, or something to do with whether they are an account customer or a proforma customer. With regards to automations, it’s the marker on that customer account that will determine the process they follow at some stage. For argument’s sake, if you had an account customer and you have received and order, commission or job, the process you go through is going to be completely different to what you would go through for a customer who is on an upfront payment. An account customer is not going to get an invoice generated until the very end, but an upfront payment is going to get an invoice generated almost immediately, right at the very start of that order or job process. These tags essentially allow the system to trigger automations at different stages based on what we know about the customer. That’s one aspect of how this ties in with automations and why we recommend doing this. We’ve also got contact tags, so for those that deal in a B2B space, you’ll be familiar with the concept. We’ve got companies, customers and contacts as well so that you can have multiple contacts out of business. Again, having these set up is not so much about the conditional aspect of the automations, this is more about what you can actually do with the automations, which we will cover as we go through. We did run a poll about which webinar to approach first and automations was top of the bill, the other one we looked at was prebuilds. Prebuilds have a lot to them, but having these set up in some way, shape or form prior to embarking on automations is well worthwhile. In essence, prebuilds essentially give you little process engines to cover different scenarios. So, we’re looking at an invoice prebuild screen here, depending on what you do as a business, you might have a prebuild for deposit payments. What happens is, you can give it a different email template when it sends that out, because it is sending out an email template relative to a deposit invoice. The actual template document that you use behind that can be different to what it would be if it was an account customer’s invoice. You can set up other things, you can automatically create and assign tasks or actions to specific members of staff as things move from one step into the next. You can automatically create things like eForms or automated messaging, specific to those prebuilds. These do come into the way that the automation rules work in the system, which is why we suggest looking at these and getting them set up. Again, if anyone is in need of any assistance with that please don’t hesitate to get in touch because when you start to use the automations, the prebuilds, the tags and the business types, it really takes the CRM to another level all together.
Whenever customers start using Zigaflow, which you have probably found yourself, you do get an increase in productivity because it’s easier to work through and get things done. This level of looking at the system configuration goes way beyond productivity and goes into the realms of efficiency. Some people might consider them to be the same thing, but productivity is about getting more done, efficiency is about getting more done with less input, that really what this is all about. So, getting this right is absolutely key. Those are probably the key things to consider looking at prior to setting up the automations.
We’re going to look at the automation screen and how this is set up now. Essentially, an automation is made up of three parts. There is a trigger, which is the event that has triggered the automation to kick off. The second is the conditions that must be met when that trigger happens. Like we said before, having a trigger being when a status has changed from one thing to the other is a very global trigger. You might want to change the condition on that, so it changes to a specific status, for instance, only when it’s a particular business type or a particular customer tag. The third and final piece of that is the actions, which is what the automation is actually going to do. All of the automations are incremental, so you can create automations that only facilitate a small step in a process. It doesn’t have to be a massive, complex or encompassing thing. You can get very clever with these automations. For those of you who aren’t aware, I was a customer prior to coming over to Zigaflow. I did a lot with automations and was able to get business processes flying around with very little manual input. Similarly, you can just do thing simply and build on it. What we say is really look at what you do, what your team do and what takes them time, as well as what you would class as low value work. Some really simple examples are creating invoices. It might be simple to create invoices, you can just click a button in Zigaflow, but if you are doing a high volume of jobs and orders, it is reliant on someone doing that multiple times a day, multiple times a week. If you look at how many times that has happened over the course of a year and compound the time together, you can imagine how much time has been wasted. That is just a really simple example of what you can do.
So, we’ve got a few automation rules set up in here, which I’m going into to show you some of the conditions on here. In the automation screen, you have these different modules. These modules are the trigger area in the system. Whichever module you’re in depends on the kind of functionality it is. We’re going to look at this one here, which is create a job. This rule might not be correct because this is a demo system, and if it’s not, we’ll make some adjustments. In this automation page, we are giving every automation a name. So, this one is being called ‘create a job’, and the trigger type is ‘status has changed’. Now this could be ‘status has changed’ or a ‘new quotation has been created’ on the system. We tend to find when it comes to the quotations, the majority are based on status changes. One of the most common things is a quote has been accepted and as a result, you will want to create a job or order on the system. So, we’ve got that status changed. We can set a delay on this. I’m a big advocate for setting delays on automations because if you begin building lots of little rules and joining up this very automated environment, the delay trigger is your safety net in this. This is because if I set it to five minutes, it looks at the conditions in the trigger, and it puts the automation into a queue. Just before the five-minute mark, it will recheck all the conditions are still met before carrying out the action. It is very useful because if you look at things like pipeline view in the system where you can drag and drop something from one status to another, having that five or ten minute delay gives you the reassurance that if someone accidentally drags something from one status into another, it doesn’t then unlock a chain of events throughout the system. You also have the option to allow this automation to repeat, where if you wound something back from one status to the previous one and then moved it forward again, it would repeat the automation step. I’m not sure what the use case would be, but it has been put there because someone needed it for something, I’ll need to have a look to see who used it. The conditions around this automation are that the status is equal to ‘accepted’. Now, there are various things you can do here, one being you can layer up the conditions. You’ll see some of the ones we looked at before, the business types, customer tags, order tags and the status. This is why we say that these should be done and added on prior to embarking on this. There are a couple of other variables in here, like total gross and net value. The reason they are in here is because for some customers, this can be a variable in the process. For example, if an order is over a certain value, everybody pays up, or everybody pays a 50% deposit, no matter if you are an account customer. It is these types of things that are the conditions that have to be met before the action is taken. So, in this instance, this is set to status ‘accepted’. We could say when the status is ‘accepted’ and client tag exists of ‘account customer’, then we are going to proceed with the next action. Now obviously, that wouldn’t make sense, it’s not logical in this instance, but it’s just to give a demonstration that there are multiple conditions that would have to be met for it to happen. You can also have an ‘or’ statement on here, so one set of conditions up here, or another set of conditions. It means that if these conditions or those conditions are met, then we are going to proceed with the action, the action panel is down here. At the moment, this is set with ‘create a sales order’ or a job on there. This is again why we suggest looking at having the prebuilds set up because it allows you to determine which prebuild that uses to create something on the system. The idea behind this is that for business types (if you did commercial and residential), you would essentially have a prebuild for commercial and a prebuild for residential on the quote side. Then, inside of each of them would be tagged up as the commercial or the residential business types. When a quote has been accepted within that business type, you can say you want to create a job using that specific prebuild which is set out with all the processes, workflows and tasks associated with delivering a commercial job, versus using a prebuild that is set up with all the tasks and functions that come with doing a residential job.
I know there is quite a lot we’re going through here; I realise it is a lot to absorb and take in. Please don’t feel like you are on your own with this, if you have any question, please hit us up and we can go through this in a private session.
This is set for creating a job, some of the other actions you can carry out here are creating different record types, and also change statuses. With this particular one, if the quote is related to a project, you can update the status of the project. The use cases very much depend on how you run your processes. Here you can also add and remove tags. We want to look at the tags because we have the customer tags, the contact tags and the order tags on the quotation. Let’s just use a job as an example. So, if you had an audit tag on a job saying urgent, once that job has completed or passed a particular step in the process, you’re probably going to want to remove that tag because it’s no longer urgent as it’s been dealt with. The other one might be that you want to have a tag against customers to show that they have a live order. So, as a quote’s been accepted, you might add a tag to the customer. To show that when you look in the CRM, at a quick glance you can see that customer has a live order going on.
Now, there are lots of ways you can view that data, I’m just summarising examples of this. This function essentially allows you to add or remove these tags or markers from customers, contacts and records that you’re working on. It just creates a fluid process where people don’t have to go and take those things away, because when it comes to things like order tags, they are something you can put onto a quote record and leave it there to stay forever. But for some instances, the temporary markers are just to draw people’s attention to certain records on the system.
On this quote screen, when the status changes to ‘accepted’ on the quote, it is going to wait five minutes. After five minutes, it’s going to create a job using that pre-build. Looking at the job automations, we could have another one that says, ‘create deposit invoice’, which will happen when a new job is created. The quote has now created a job automatically, which nobody has had to go and do. Again, just going to wait five minutes. We now have the choice to make this active or not, which I didn’t cover off in the other one. This just means you have created a ruling principle, so if you want to work on building things up without pushing them active, do that. Again, if you wanted to set some up, talk to us about it, don’t activate them, just set them up and we can review them with you. We are now setting up the conditions that need to be met for this, we are going to say that the client tag ‘exists’ with the value ‘invoice 50% on order’ from our customer tags, and then we are going to create the action. The action we are going to set up on here is to create an invoice, and that invoice is going to be put in draft and we’re going to use the invoice prebuild for the 50% deposit, we’re going to change the assigned user on this, which would allow you to change it to whoever’s responsible for the invoicing. If you had an accounts email address, you would change the assigned user to accounts if you wanted to. I’m not going to change it because we don’t have an accounts one. You have the choice: is it a proforma invoice, or a part invoice? With it being a part invoice, I’m going to change it to 50% and we’re going to select to keep the line item details on the invoice. Here, the system can behave two ways, it can create a single line invoice to say that it is a 50% deposit against all the number ‘X’, or it can be 50% of every single line item that is on the original order. In most circumstances, I’d recommend doing the 50% on the line items, only because if you are connected to something like Zero, QuickBooks, or Sage, you may want to push that line-item information across for reporting etc in the accounting software. And I’m going to click save on this. So that’s now created this rule. Another thing we can do here is change the status of one of the jobs to ‘awaiting deposit’ automatically when that invoice has been created. You may want to do this differently and wait until the invoice has been sent to the customer before that automates moving it across to ‘awaiting deposit’, because technically if the invoice hasn’t gone out, you’re not awaiting the deposit yet.
So, this one is now creating the deposit invoice. For some customers, this is as far as you want to go with an invoice because some people like to do the checks and balances and make sure everything is right and take control of sending out invoices. We can also create an automation for sending invoices, so when a new invoice is created, and I’ll put a delay on this, there are no conditions, it’s just if a new invoice is created, send emails to the customer contact. Now, in the customer records, you can specify accounts, payable contacts too if you are not using that already. When it comes to the CRM records, you can have a customer and then within the customer you can specify different contacts. One of the things you can do is specify the contact who receives invoices. So, when you set up the automations, or even if you create an invoice manually from an order, the system will automatically rev out from John Smith who paid and placed the order to Joe Bloggs who’s responsible for the accounts and invoices. We have the ability to change the recipient, when it isn’t an invoice contact, the system will swap it over to the invoice contact at the customer records. If one does not exist, it will use the same contact as the order. That is the automation to send an email. You can see here this is using the mail tags that you use on documents and other emails around the system so you can build this email out. You’ve got the subject line which you can set here, and this ‘include PDF’, which will include the actual PDF of the invoice on this email. Again, you can set it to change the invoice to ‘sent’ status once it’s been successfully sent from the system. Going through that process, you have had a customer accept a quote that has subsequently created a job on the system. We’ve said: does that customer pay a deposit? Yes. Here, create a deposit invoice, and because we have created that invoice, which has automatically been sent to the customer. We have a couple of delays on there but ultimately, within about 15 minutes of a customer accepting a quote, you’ve got a record of the job on your system, you’ve got the invoice created for the deposit, and the customer’s got it in their hand, hopefully ready to pay nice and quickly. That has all happened without any kind of interaction.
You can also break this down; I tend to encourage the use of small automation rules and steps because it allows you to keep an easier track of what they are doing. Using a naming convention that makes sense to you is really important. From here, we could set up a status change, and this doesn’t have to be Xero, it could be QuickBooks or Sage, but in this instance, we’re going to look at Xero. We are saying now when the status has changed to ‘sent’, which we did in the previous automation, export to Xero. So, if Xero and Zigaflow are connected, now that the deposit invoice has been raised and sent to the customer, you can automatically export to Xero. The way this works, and with QuickBooks as well, is its bidirectional, so if someone is working through payments, money received, they can then update when they update the bank feed transactions in Xero or QuickBooks, which would then feed that across and into Zigaflow, which would automatically change the invoice to paid. This is a setting you can switch on or off. Imagine you’ve done a quote, turned that into a job, the customer pays a deposit, so you’ve sent them a deposit invoice that’s been pushed into your accounting software. You’ve received the payment; the invoice is automatically updated to paid. Another step you might want to add is ‘update job to awaiting deposit’ when an invoice status is equal to ‘sent’. Change related job status to ‘awaiting deposit’, again we haven’t got these set up properly, but if it was set up you would choose it. You have the ability to tick this box here and say ‘do not do action if job is on a later status’. When you look at your processes here and the statuses you go through, this is essentially a process, and should have a start and a finish. If you look at a process map, it will have a start bit and an end bit at the bottom. This sales order job process essentially is a start to finish process. So, if you’ve got an ‘awaiting deposit’ status here and you pass that point, it’s moved on and you’ve got to the end and you’ve created an invoice, which is the second payment on that job. By ticking this box, it is stopping changing it to that status, which is prior to the one you are at now. This allows it to behave differently for a deposit invoice than it would do for say, a final balance invoice on a job. This all begins to start building up a joined-up ecosystem of small automation steps that are taking everything through. Quote has been accepted; job has been created. Is it an account customer? No. Okay, we’re going to create a deposit invoice. We’ve now sent that to the customer, and it’s been exported to the accounting system. Customer has paid it; somebody has marked it as paid. That has then triggered it to say that it’s paid in Zigaflow when it was sent to the customer. It has changed the status of the order to ‘awaiting payment’ so that you’ve got the visibility of the job in your works pipeline, but its status tells you to not do anything with it because you’re waiting for payment from the customer. Once the invoice has been changed to paid, this is when you can update the job. We can say ‘move job to processing status’ when a status on an invoice has changed to being equal to ‘paid’. Then we want to take the job or the sales order and we want to move that forward to the next step in the process. This is where the prebuilds start to come into play, because the idea of prebuilds is that on a particular type of job, when it gets into production, it’s going to automatically say that there are tasks that need to be done, here is who’s responsible for doing them, and starts to assign tasks to customers. You can also use the prebuilds to configure email correspondence to customers that are then triggered, so the automations are not just exclusively in the automation section. You are essentially mapping out what your operational processes look like. So, whether that’s the process that you go through from a sales standpoint, or whether it’s what you do from the service delivery, invoicing processes, purchase ordering processes, there is a whole world of things that you can build into this. It’s not to be overwhelming, but there are certain things which will be really quick wins, like when a quote’s accepted, we want to create a job or an order, or when an order is created, we maybe want to send an order confirmation automatically. The key is considering how things move through those processes, look at comms with your customers as well, because you know that if you regularly send an email to a customer saying ‘this is where we are up to…’ or ‘we’ve got this far through…’ or ‘we aim to have this with you in the next 48 hours’ – what triggers that? What triggers somebody to do that in the company? Have a look at actually building these things in.
We’ve got a question here: ‘I’m setting up an automation to send an order confirmation to a customer, when the status changes, how do I link the order confirmation to the automated email to the customer?’. So, in this instance, which would be triggered from here, you would go to configure -> automations. You would go into the sales order or the job section, I’m going to use ‘send automatic order confirmation’ as an example. At the moment, this is set up for a new job or order being created, I’m going to change that to a status change. You can set this up with this status change, which I’m assuming based on your message, you have done already. The new action is then to send emails, where you are defining who it goes to, you are setting up your subject line, the content of your body via email and then this tick box here that will include the order confirmation PDF that you have generated from the sales order or the job module. That would then be included in that email, and that’s how you would automatically send out the order confirmation to the customer, does that help? Excellent.
Here we have another: ‘When I send a deposit invoice, I like to include the installation date in the invoice line, which is in a custom field on the quote, can I tag this?’. So, I presume if you are using a custom field for installation dates at the quote stage, it’s more of a provisional date for the installation rather than a confirmed date. You have a couple of options here, one is when you create a custom field, the name you give it essentially becomes the tag that you would use to pull that information through. If you have this information set up on a quote, and you click here to create an update across the modules, this then copies that custom field throughout all the other modules in the system, and you can choose which ones you want to show and hide it in, in different screens as well. The tag would be the same and you could use it in the body of the invoice, or even in the email that you send with the invoice. Another question: ‘Is it possible to have a click here link in the body of the email?’. Yes, it is. We have the review link tag here, where the system generates a unique URL where customers or suppliers can click and access that record. It’s for things like e-signatures or confirmations. The tag, this review link, in order to build that into an email, you would type click here. I’m going to give you a piece of advice on using the term ‘click here’, Spam filters do not like the term ‘click here’ because it’s one of the most used things in phishing and spam attacks. Be careful on the choice of words. I’ve realised that we haven’t added this into the automation panels yet, but if you look at the other areas of the system where you can set up email templates and scheduled messages, we have introduced this spam checker. If I click here, it comes up with two issues that it has picked up on, which is ‘click here’ and ‘click this link’. I would say be very conscious of the choice of words. You’ll find this spam checker is now anywhere that you add email templates and scheduled messages, even when you come to previewing a quote to send, the spam checker is there too. If you did want to use that term, click here, if you highlight the text and click these three dots -> edit link. For instance, this link here where it says, ‘click this link to review job’, you can see that underneath that, it has set up this review link tag, so it then sends the unique link that is linked to that specific record. I’m not 100% sure why it wasn’t working for me in the automation panel so if you have the same problem, get in touch. Essentially, that is what you would give if you waned them to click through and access an invoice, a quote or an order confirmation.
This webinar will be uploaded to our resource centre, some of our other recordings are on there already. If anyone has any questions that come off after the call, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You’ll find that if you click on the purple icon inside your Zigaflow account and click on training support you can book in a support session or a training session with us, and we can give you a bit of one-on-one help with anything that you want to look at with the automations. I hope everyone has found that really helpful. I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thank you.