Learn About Workflow

At Gnatta, when we talk about ‘Workflow’ or ‘the workflow engine’, we’re referencing a collection of features that work together to make stuff happen in your Gnatta domain. Here are some examples of what workflow is used for:

• Creating a chatbot journey (with quick replies) to gather customer data before assigning to an agent

• Detecting keywords in a customer’s message, combining that with other contextual information about the customer, and then making a complex decision on where to route the customer

• Collecting data from an external system to automatically verify a customer’s identity and pass security checks

And more! The possibilities with our engine are (almost) limitless. Here’s how it works.

Flow vs Workflow

What’s the difference? These terms, in Gnatta, are not interchangeable. Their respective definitions are:

Workflow: A workflow is triggered by an event, and contains a series of flows. A workflow is the ‘bigger picture’ of connected flows that work together to react to the event that was triggered.

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The Workflow for inbound messages to our Hello@Gnatta.com email address

Flow: A flow is a micro-series of actions that can be visualised as a ‘map’ in the builder. These actions (like Create Interaction or Connect Conversation) are what you’ll use to make changes and decisions about how to handle the event at hand. More about actions here.

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A Junk Checker flow we’ve used on our email inbox

These two concepts, together, are the crux of how Gnatta ‘works’. By attaching a flow (or multiple flows) to an event, you’re creating a ‘workflow’. This is how you fine-tune exactly what happens whenever something important changes in your Gnatta domain.

But, why?

One of the first questions new Gnatta users ask is ‘why isn’t it all just one big flow for each event'. The answer is simple. In a nutshell, it’s about scalability.

If you break down all the common functions in a contact centre into a list of pre-defined responses, you can create reusable ‘building blocks’. Those building blocks, put together, can create harmony in your customer service team. When you make a change to one of those ‘building blocks’, the change is enacted everywhere.

An example workflow

You can attach multiple flows to each event. Those flows will execute in the order they are listed. Let’s use this example:

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We might attach to this specific event a series of three flows, with the following goals in mind:

1. First, you’ll want to check if this is a brand new message, or if it’s related to an existing interaction. So the first flow might be ‘Find or Create’, where you check for an existing interaction, and how long ago the last response was before deciding whether to create a new interaction to store your conversation in.

2. Next you may want to extract text from the message body or other contextual data with RegEx, and log that in data fields against the interaction. You might use a universal flow like ‘Detect and Update’ to do this.

3. Finally, you’ll want to queue the interaction - making a decision on exactly which queue based on the data fields you updated in the previous flow. You could use a universal ‘Queue Interaction’ flow to do this.

Most workflows in Gnatta should be composed of a series of predefined building blocks / templates, just like this. Building your contact centre automation this way will mean you can scale infinitely as your business grows, and monitor your automation performance more accurately.

Use cases & templates

Looking for more use cases and workflow templates? Check out this article here.