How do you set up a recurring Certification Workflow?

Marketing & Content Hub Lists, Lead Scoring & Workflows
1

Hi HubSpotters!

My team and I have hit a bit of a snag at the moment when it comes to creating a workflow related to certifications. I thought it might be helpful to run our issue by the Community Hive Mind to see if anyone else has tackled a similar problem and has a novel solution.

So, here’s the situation:

Our customers all need to participate in a certification course. We keep track of this through a contact property called ‘Certification’ (Customers can be marked as ‘passed’, ‘failed’, ‘registered,’ ‘pending’ etc.)

However, certification only lasts two years. So, after a certain point of time, Customers need to receive alerts reminding them to re-certify. If they don’t re-certify, then we need to create automation that would move their certification status to ‘expired.’

Here’s the challenge: HubSpot workflows triggered based on any date property to not allow for re-enrollment. So, if the trigger is something like "Enroll contact when ‘Certfication’ was moved to ‘Passed’ 21 months ago…This means a contact can only go through a ‘re-certification reminder workflow’ once - then they can never get re-enrolled ever again.

In other words, what this means is that, after their first 2 years, they will get reminded to re-certify, but AFTER that, they will never be reminded to re-certify again after another 2 years (so, a total of 4 years.)

We’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure out how we can trigger enrollment in this worfklow in a way that will ensure contacts are continuously re-enrolled in it after they renew their certifications. We need contacts to be nudged towards recertification even after 2,4,6,8+ years.

Anyone deal with something like this before? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

2

Hi @JMayhew6

Interesting dilemma. Could you outline how the ‘certification’ property gets changed?

I’m trying to understand the process, especially once it’s expired. Do you have an expired status?

You might be able to do a workflow based on the certification property, the enrolment trigger is “is known”. My thinking is the following:

  • In HubSpot, this covers any change to the property
  • So every time this property changes a contact gets enrolled
  • You then check what the status is, i.e. expired
  • If it is you push them into the “reminder workflow” - the “Enroll in another workflow” action is treated as manual enrolment, so a contact can get “re-enrolled”

Would require some testing, but should get you the desired result.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Frank

3

One way to set up a workflow in HubSpot to remind customers to re-certify and move their certification status to “expired” after a certain period of time is to use a combination of date properties and the “Delay until date” property in the workflow.

Here’s an example of how you could set this up:

  1. Create a date property in HubSpot to track the expiration date of the certification. This could be calculated based on the date the customer passed the certification, or it could be entered manually.
  2. Create a workflow that is triggered when the certification status is changed to “passed.”
  3. Add a “Delay until date” action to the workflow, and set the delay to the expiration date of the certification. This will pause the workflow until the certification expires.
  4. Add an “Update contact property” action to the workflow, and set the certification status to “expired.”
  5. Add a “Send email” action to the workflow to remind the customer to re-certify.
  6. Add a “Branch” action to the workflow to check if the customer has re-certified. If they have, you can add an action to update the certification status to “passed” and set the expiration date to the new expiration date. If they have not re-certified, you can add an action to update the certification status to “expired” and set the expiration date to the current date.

By using this approach, you can set up a workflow that will continuously remind customers to re-certify and update their certification status based on their actions.

I hope this helps! If you have any further questions or need more assistance with setting up this workflow, please don’t hesitate to ask.

4

One solution to this problem would be to create a separate workflow that runs on a set schedule (e.g., every 6 months) that checks the ‘Certification’ property of all contacts and sends a reminder email to those whose certification is set to expire within the next 6 months. Additionally, you can create a separate workflow that runs when a contact’s certification status is set to ‘expired’ and sends an email or takes any other action you deem necessary.

Another solution is to use a custom date property to track the next certification date and create a workflow that triggers based on that date property. This would allow you to re-enroll contacts in the certification reminder workflow every time their certification expires.

You can also use an automation to update the custom date property with the next certification date, based on the current certification status.

It’s important to note that creating a separate workflow that runs on a set schedule, and triggering it based on a custom date property allows you to continuously re-enroll contacts in the certification reminder workflow even after 2,4,6,8+ years.

5

This is a fun one. I would say that it would be really cool to see your certifications listed as a Custom Object. Then create your workflows off your Custom Object Status property in conjuction with a date field. However, this can also be achieved without a custom object.

You can create a workflow that triggers when your Status Property is “Known” with re-enrollment enabled. This would trigger the record to enter the workflow anytime that property is updated. After the record enters the program I would pass it through a If/Then branch. I would branch the “Expired” records. For the records that have a status of “Expired”, I would then move those records through another branch where I check the Certifcation Date property to see if that the date has expired. If the date meets the condition, I would then trigger the Notification Email. If the date does not qualify, the record exits the workflow. This would be a great time to check if any other status warrant outbound communication, or internal alerts.

Cheers,

Riley

6

I have suggested the ability for a workflow to retrigger itself so you can make a “check every 3 months that …” without having to make the suggested type of workarounds.

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Recurring-workflow-to-trigger-itself-until-a-condition-is-met/idi-p/770824