Activity Based Workflows

[sgerrits]

Because activities can't act as re-enrollment trigger, it would be great to have activity based workflows.  

An example of an application would be that every time I log a phone call with outcome = left voice mail, it will send an automated email to the contact.  You could create similar workflows depending on the outcome of a call or meeting.  

[sgerrits]

Hello,

We're exploring the addition of other objects, like meetings, though cannot currently say if/when they will be added.  We appreciate the continued feedback.

Best,

Megan

[sgerrits]

Hi everyone,

Call workflows are now live to all customers with access to the workflows tool. Please let us know if you have feedback 😀

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[sgerrits]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you know that Task centered workflows went into public beta today. You can join the beta through the product update found via this link: 

https://app.hubspot.com/l/product-updates/all/?update=13961268

If you have any questions or feedback about the task workflows please send me a message. We'll continue to explore adding support for additional activity types. 

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[sgerrits]

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to post an update since there have been some new options introduced that solve some of these use cases. Last year "When an event occurs" triggers were added (KB doc), which made a number of new trigger options available. As mentioned as needed in many of the comments here, these new triggers include: Meetings, Calls, and Sales documents interactions. 

To use these options, create a Contact workflow and select the trigger type "When an event occurs." Here are some screenshots for reference:

 

 

 

Another great thing about these event driven triggers is that the contact will enroll and re-enroll every time the event happens. So for example if you have a Meeting booked trigger, every time the contact books a meeting they will enroll. This should help with a lot of the needs outlined above : )

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[MeganLegge]

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to post an update since there have been some new options introduced that solve some of these use cases. Last year "When an event occurs" triggers were added (KB doc), which made a number of new trigger options available. As mentioned as needed in many of the comments here, these new triggers include: Meetings, Calls, and Sales documents interactions. 

To use these options, create a Contact workflow and select the trigger type "When an event occurs." Here are some screenshots for reference:

 

 

 

Another great thing about these event driven triggers is that the contact will enroll and re-enroll every time the event happens. So for example if you have a Meeting booked trigger, every time the contact books a meeting they will enroll. This should help with a lot of the needs outlined above : )

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[nlsn]

I ran into this problem today as we are trying to set automation to send a AI summary via email for every call. The notes are left in the activities section of a contact and there's no way to get that data as its not a property in a contact. 

[Speno]

This is something we need too.

@MeganLegge  the new triggers have made things better in specific situations but it doesn't address the need for an activity-based workflow.

In our situation we use Zoomphone to make calls, however, this only provides the option of "call notes" and "call outcome", not "call meeting type".  I've raised this with Zoom to add this drop-down.  However, I had hoped that it would be possible to set an activity workflow that if the specific text were added to the comments, it would automatically update just that single call "call type".  Unfortunately, the only way of doing this at present is to do it based on contact level, this unfortunately results in all associated call's "call types" being updated rather than just the one, which isn't helpful.

[DBGNZ]

We're currently working with a client where contacts need to be added to one report and taken out of another via the the result of the latest call outcome. We need a workflow to change a contact property which stores this. Very frustrating this is not available. Should be a simple fix?

[ChrisPower1]

It's great that you can now incorporate activity properties into a workflow trigger, but you can't actually access the properties of the activity that fired the trigger within the workflow.  For example, I can trigger a workflow for any contacts that have meetings more than 3 days old without an updated outcome, but then in the workflow, there's no way to determine which activity actually triggered the workflow, I can only refer to the most recently created/updated, first created, or most recently associated meeting.  But not the specific one that triggered the workflow. 

[YGemayel]

@ChrisPower1 you can determine meeting types for activities and create your trigger with the action you want to track AND the meeting type of that activity to determine it

[ChrisPower1]

@YGemayel You can, but that doesn't solve the problem I just described.  There's still no way within the workflow to refer to the properties of the specific meeting that triggered the workflow.  

[MartinK]

Obviously, this feature is not a priority, however strange that may seem. I don't know many CRM systems that can't parse activities like meetings or phone calls properly. There is still a lot of low-level stuff missing (date arithmetic, string operations, etc.) that makes working with HS increasingly cumbersome.

The inbound tool that HS started as is kinda obsolete, today you need smart outbound tools to be successful.

Not really what HS is good at.

Pity,

[MeganLegge]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you know that Task centered workflows went into public beta today. You can join the beta through the product update found via this link: 

https://app.hubspot.com/l/product-updates/all/?update=13961268

If you have any questions or feedback about the task workflows please send me a message. We'll continue to explore adding support for additional activity types. 

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[PSterkenburg]

@MeganLegge this is absolutely fantastic news! I saw that also Note creation in Workflows is live. Now we just need Calls, Meetings, and Emails, and we're getting there! 😉 

[MartinK]

Unfortunately, task-centric workflows are not activity-centric workflows. The much needed functionality to handle calls, emails, meetings and other activities in a meaningful way is still missing.

[LauGil]

I need to be able to edit meeting outcomes base on what deal stage the deal enters.

[MeganLegge]

Hi everyone,

Call workflows are now live to all customers with access to the workflows tool. Please let us know if you have feedback 😀

Best,

Megan Legge

Product Manager for Workflows

[MartinK]

Hi great news,

What about email workflows?

thx

[L_P]

Hello Megan, can you use logged meetings as a trigger as well or is it only calls at this stage?

[RichFrankel]

I see a lot of progress on this.  I wanted to amplify that the ability to build a workflow based on an email would be enormously helpful.  We receive many leads from partners that use formatted emails, and also use jotforms to collect information, including some info that needs to be imposed onto a pdf of specific forms.   Where we get hung up is not being able to use an email as an enrollment trigger.  If we could, with ops hub, we can build custom code actions to handle email parsing and say assign an email form completion or new lead based on the body of the email.   The problem we run into is that we can't enroll a workflow based on the email so we can't easily target the email with a custom code action.  

This means we are overly reliant on zapier which adds points of failure and makes it harder to cleanly get communications to where they need to go.   Allowing a simple extension to the conversation based workflow of email received / filter criteria = sender address, would be enough for us to build what we need.  

[MartinK]

True, you can pick up the reply date and trigger something, but you can't get to the email itself.

[BLarsen]

@MeganLegge  Does this new Call workflow include Meetings as triggers as well?

[MartinK]

No! The new functionality only provides a hook for the end of the call and its outcome—it’s not a true activity-based workflow. Since the call outcome cannot be captured and used in downstream processing, you’ll need to create multiple workflows to handle different outcomes separately.

[georgieh]

Hi @MeganLegge - whilst I haven't specifically tried it yet, the new call workflows looks great. We have a need for this same functionality for meetings, and not just meetings created via HubSpot meetings -  we need this for all meeting activities in HS, regardless of the source. Is this something in the roadmap?