Use NEW custom behavioral event as a Workflow trigger
There is a new Behavioral Event functionality for Marketing Enterprise, and the old one is marked as a "legacy". The new one supports only Delay until event happens feature on workflows. Knowledgebase article explains how it works, but currently, you can't use events for anything else but delays.
We want to use Behavioral Events also as a trigger – not delay. For example, when event X happens, we want a Slack notification.
This is an important feature for especially Sales and Service, when something critical happens. Also, Marketing people can benefit from this. When notification reaches proper persons, they can serve better customers in real-time.
My name is Sierra Howard and I'm also a Product Manager on the Automation/Workflows team.
Thank you all for your feedback! We've implemented the ability to trigger Custom Behavioral Events as a workflow trigger AND workflows based on event triggers. So instead of initially creating a trigger from a list of objects/property triggers, you will be able to trigger when an event happens. One of the events included is “property value changed” but not specifically for “updated in last X days”. It happens at the time of the property change. For example, when a contact’s city is updated to Boston vs contact city is equal to Boston. My hope is that this is a solution to what you're needing!
The next step is to get some beta testers to test it out in private beta before we release it more broadly.If you're interested in participating in the beta, please fill out this form. We will then give you access within 36 business hours of you submitting the form, but may not let you know once we've given you access so be sure to check in your portal. You will see the beta banner when you go to set up a workflow trigger. There's more information in the form, but looking forward to getting your feedback and making this available to everyone.
Thank you for continuing to add your questions and comments. We understand your needs for this functionality and it remains a top priority on our end.
For clarification, the vast majority of you will have already seen a system upgrade to your lists tool, which brought the new custom behavioral events filters to your contact lists. There is a very small percentage of portals where the lists system upgrade may still be underway. If you do not see the new custom behavioral event (CBE) filters in your contact lists, please reach out to your HubSpot point of contact for more information and assistance. This is the available workaround that helps you use the new CBEs in contact workflows, by triggering workflows off of lists where those filters are available. I know this workaround has limitations, such as re-enrollment mentioned in a follow up comment, but I assure you we are continuing to work toward our end goal of making workflow functionality for CBEs complete.
The workflows team is now actively working on the system upgrades, that I mentioned we were planning, back in November. We've been working on them for the last couple of months, and we have at least several months of work remaining. We consider this a top priority, and it will remain high priority work on our end. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding. Any future news about this will be relayed here, on this thread.
I’m Megan Legge, a product manager for HubSpot’s workflows tool. Thank you all for taking the time to upvote and comment on this Idea. We hear your feedback and we agree that this functionality is important. There are a couple of large systems changes that the workflows tool will need to make in order to support the new custom behavioral event (CBE) functionality in workflow triggers. We’re currently planning out the work for those system upgrades, and it will take some time, but they are on our roadmap.
After those changes, we’ll be better positioned to tackle this request of having access to custom behavioral events as workflow triggers. In the meantime, the good news is there's an alternate way you can support your CBE & automation use cases, today:
Create a contact list and use the new CBE filters that are available there to capture the contacts who complete the event you’re interested in
Create a contact workflow that uses a “List Membership” trigger, and select the list you made in the previous step. When a new contact completes the event, they will join that list, and enroll in the workflow.
If you have questions about how to set this up, please reach out to support. Any future news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread.
While that may be true, we have clients who need these events for specific logic branching depending on micro events/conversions such as video/audio interaction. We have ways of stitching data between systems to know who did what/where/when, but we don't have efficient ways of changing the content or nuturing conditionallly based on the content they are interacting with. That is my frustration 🙂
I’m Megan Legge, a product manager for HubSpot’s workflows tool. Thank you all for taking the time to upvote and comment on this Idea. We hear your feedback and we agree that this functionality is important. There are a couple of large systems changes that the workflows tool will need to make in order to support the new custom behavioral event (CBE) functionality in workflow triggers. We’re currently planning out the work for those system upgrades, and it will take some time, but they are on our roadmap.
After those changes, we’ll be better positioned to tackle this request of having access to custom behavioral events as workflow triggers. In the meantime, the good news is there's an alternate way you can support your CBE & automation use cases, today:
Create a contact list and use the new CBE filters that are available there to capture the contacts who complete the event you’re interested in
Create a contact workflow that uses a “List Membership” trigger, and select the list you made in the previous step. When a new contact completes the event, they will join that list, and enroll in the workflow.
If you have questions about how to set this up, please reach out to support. Any future news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread.
Thank you, Megan! We really appreciate your response. Large system changes are a good reason why this is not available yet and I believe we can wait. This workaround solution is good. Hopefully, people can find it.
Hi @RudyChaney We're currently in pre-planning now for this. Some context: We're already on the Enterprise tier and there were some(CBE) functionality roadblocks we ran into because our portal is powered by an older list processing and segmentation engine. Some of those roadblocks included our inability to run events-based trigger workflows and access to CBE filters in active lists. Its been a major pain point for our org, so looking forward to this change. I'll keep you posted here on our progress.
@ROKelly0 thanks for the update. That makes sense. I believe we are able to use them in this way, but hoping we will also be able to build lists against how many times a CBE occurred, similar to Legacy Events.
The list workaround doesn't work for me as we may have the same person trigger the same event multiple times a day. How might we deal with this? Any ideas? @MeganLegge do you have any suggestions or do you have a timeline update on when the workflow trigger might be available? I already reached out to support with a case/ticket who directed me back to the Ideas forum.
The support of the new custom behavioral event in the Zapier action os also important. We would not be able to stop using the old behavioral events before this is supported.
Thank you for continuing to add your questions and comments. We understand your needs for this functionality and it remains a top priority on our end.
For clarification, the vast majority of you will have already seen a system upgrade to your lists tool, which brought the new custom behavioral events filters to your contact lists. There is a very small percentage of portals where the lists system upgrade may still be underway. If you do not see the new custom behavioral event (CBE) filters in your contact lists, please reach out to your HubSpot point of contact for more information and assistance. This is the available workaround that helps you use the new CBEs in contact workflows, by triggering workflows off of lists where those filters are available. I know this workaround has limitations, such as re-enrollment mentioned in a follow up comment, but I assure you we are continuing to work toward our end goal of making workflow functionality for CBEs complete.
The workflows team is now actively working on the system upgrades, that I mentioned we were planning, back in November. We've been working on them for the last couple of months, and we have at least several months of work remaining. We consider this a top priority, and it will remain high priority work on our end. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding. Any future news about this will be relayed here, on this thread.
@MeganLegge this is awesome, thank you for the update.
One other list feature that would be really great is being able to filter by occurence time. At least in our portal, we can only filter by if the event occured at least once, which limits how dynamic that selection is.
I suppose with workflow triggers that might eliminate the need, but wanted to pass along that feedback.
Heh. Just talked this feature up into the clouds to a client that just got onto Enterprise, figuring it must already be there because CBE's have been in for a while now. Never realised you couldn't include them in workflow triggers yet. But glad to hear it's being worked on!