This is part of our series Inside Workato’s Kitchen, where we show you how we use our own product to automate each section of our business.
Enhancing Development and Engineering
Auto-requesting product issues or enhancements in FreshDesk and notifying engineering in Github
Sometimes a customer will notice a problem with the site or wants to request an enhancement. When they report a bug or submit an enhancement request through our support portal, an issue has to be raised to the development team so they can build out the enhancement or fix the issue. The Development team tracks issues and requests through GitHub, but FreshDesk is the main customer-facing ticketing system. There is no easy way to create a GitHub Issue without leaving FreshDesk and logging into GitHub and GitHub doesn’t allow for selective commenting, so as a quick fix, we use a prebuilt integration between FreshDesk and GitHub. Inside FreshDesk, agents can simply create an issue in Github with a click of a button to send the information to Engineering/Product team. The GitHub issue gets assigned to development team Personnel, who uses the FreshDesk Ticket to communicate with the customer.
However, the pre-built integration does not allow us to:
- See customer information in GitHub
The plan details of the customer and priority status of important customers do not go through using the pre-built integration. - Selectively send comments from Freshdesk to GitHub
- Send Notifications
Whenever someone is assigned to the issue on GitHub, Freshdesk does not get a notification of the assignment, and there are no notifications sent to the ticket owner. - Have comments from GitHub reopen Freshdesk tickets
When the development team has questions for the user who reported the issue, the ticket does not get reopened and the Customer Success team does not know about the request. - Control for duplicates before creating GitHub issues
Workato can support all of the scenarios above and creating a custom integration on Workato that will take care of these pain points is in the works. Making GitHub and FreshDesk fully communicate helps facilitate better communication between the development team and Customer Success team, as well as helping customers get results faster.
Accessing GitHub Information in Slack Chat
Almost every other department like Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, and more needs to communicate with the dev team to report issues and build out new enhancements. While chatting in Slack, any team member may need to bring up issues to the development team or need to check the status of an issue, which are tracked in GitHub. Having a quick way to retrieve issue data without having to access GitHub in another window and lose context in the messaging thread would increase productivity for all departments, so we created a recipe to do this.
A Workbot recipe allows anyone to input a GitHub issue number in Slack during a conversation. Workbot goes into GitHub, retrieves key information on the issue such as the issue status, and displays it to the user requesting it.
Another Workbot recipe allows the user to list GitHub issues with a single command. This list allows the development team to quickly discuss issues that have been brought up by other team members in chat channels.
Instead of having to navigate to GitHub and search for the issue, it now takes 5 seconds for the user to retrieve an issue from GitHub and get relevant information on it.
Auto-Recurring Reporting
Automating internal reports from Salesforce on Google Sheets
Workato Management requires weekly reports on different aspects of the company to keep track of how the company is progressing over time. Data needs to be retrieved from the many different applications that Workato uses and gathered in spreadsheets to be analyzed.
To automatically retrieve and manipulate data for reporting purposes without human intervention we created a recipe that retrieves data from Salesforce when an opportunity is marked as Closed Won in Salesforce (Closed Won means the customer has signed up for a paid plan). It then retrieves further details from Salesforce, such as the account name, and adds a new row in Google Sheets for analysis.
Instead of generating the report from Salesforce manually, which takes about 2 hours, the report is automatically updated with the latest information from Salesforce. Manual data entry errors are also completely eliminated using this recipe.
Mechanized Platform Partner On-Boarding
Triaging New Sign Ups and DocuSign Contract Deployment
The Workato Partner Program is designed to give consultants all the tools they need to use Workato for their client’s integration workflows. Members of the program have access to special partner webinars, newsletters, and a dashboard where they can control their client’s recipes. As interest in the program grew, we needed a way to automate the signup process including an approval step done by a human. Our signup form on the website is a Google Form which sends the responses to Google Sheets, while our contracts are sent with DocuSign.
We created a recipe to automate the approval process using our special People Task app, which builds in a human workflow step into any automation. When a partner signs up on Google Forms, People Task brings the application submission from Google Sheets to an employee for approval by emailing a link. The employee can simply click the link, view the application, then click approve or reject. If the employee approves the application, the recipe will send a DocuSign contract that is populated with the correct information from the Google Sheet to the applicant for signature. If the employee rejects the application, an email will automatically be sent to the applicant asking for more information.
Automatic On-Boarding After Approval
When someone applies and is accepted for the Workato Partner Program, they need to sign a contract and then be granted access to our partner portal to view their dashboard. To automate the process after the contract has been signed, we needed another recipe that would wait for the signed contract to come back.
This recipe, when the DocuSign contract is signed, will populate a Google Sheets column which will trigger a Task asking a Workato employee to give the partner access to the portal. It will then send a welcome email to the approved partner automatically.
The full Partner Program process looks like this:
- When someone submits an application, the Workato Recipe immediately sends an employee a confirmation email with a task to approve the application.
- Once they approve the task, the Workato Recipe immediately sends this information to DocuSign, which sends out the template to the applicant with pre-populated data from the application form.
- If they reject the application the Workato Recipe will send the applicant a different email asking for further steps or more information.
- After an approved applicant has signed the contract, the second Workato Recipe will be triggered to send the employee a task to create an account to give the partner access to the Partner Management Portal. Once the account has been created, the Workato Recipe will then send a Welcome Email to the partner.
Not only is the process automated and therefore faster for everyone, but every action taken is automatically tracked in Google Sheets. This allows us to quickly add consultants to the program without taking much employee time to do so despite the fact that a human step is required to actually approve the application.
