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.
@vgupta2 from what I can tell, you can do it, as long as you're using the "legacy" behavioral events, it's just odd that they rolled out a new feature with LESS functionality.
@AMarquardt thanks! Yup I looked into it - my challenge with legacy behavioral events is that they can't carry much data with them, so I am limited in personalization of outreach in the workflow
I'm guessing this must be a temporary omission since the new behavioural events are still in beta? Could the Hubspot Team provide a rough idea of what this will be available so I can plan whether to implement using legacy or the new events please?
I am very interested to know about this as well. I think this has to do with that they try to take certain triggers out of the enterprise plan. Like send webhook and other wf triggers and force you to buy the operations hub as well.
We also use a lot of Custom behaviour events to track our users on our web app, and it's frustarting with the lack of customization with the workflows on this.
We want to have the ablity to have an If/Then with the trigger of a behaviour event in the last X amount of days so we know who's active or not. Right now, we have nothing that can give us this.
we would love to have custom behavioral events mapped onto property fields so we can use marketing automations for this (if customer conducts action X, send email Y)
Absolutely this should be implemented. I'm really not sure why this wasn't the initial reason behind the change.
In the meantime, I am trying to use the behaviors to reflect on contact properties. Ideally, I'd use the custom event as a trigger to increase the field by +1.
I created a workflow that everybody is enrolled with 256 DELAYS UNTIL EVENT IS TRIGGERED. Every time is triggered, something is happening (increase a counter, email is triggered, alert to an internal team member)
I hope we dont get to 256 before the final solution is implemented
I really don't understand how a beta of this feature was rolled out without support for use in (arguably) the most important functionality HubSpot offers (workflows and automation). Right now its just a very clunky version of something you can do much more effieciently via Google Analytics.
not fair.... google analytics is ANONIMOUS, here we know exactly who clicks where...and there is a work around. I rather have this now and wait for the better version than nothing and waiting for the full version.
