Today, we are excited to announce the release of Automations 1.4 with 5 new integrations, spreadsheets, new features, dozens of improvements and 100+ new actions.
We thank our customers and partners for their continuous feedback and suggestions. Your input has been instrumental in driving our continuous improvements and helping us enhance our platform and services.
You can find the previous Automations.io 1.3 release post here.
New Integrations
Generate and Parse Spreadsheets
We're releasing the most requested feature for businesses that rely on spreadsheets for their day-to-day operations.
The ability to Parse Spreadsheets allows you to extract data from spreadsheets and CSV files. You can then perform calculations or use that data in the subsequent steps in the automation, such as summing up line items and creating journal entries
With the ability to Generate Spreadsheets you can now build workflows that gather data from various sources and then write it into a new or existing spreadsheet.
Date and Time Assistant
This feature enables users to easily add or subtract hours, days, months, or years from current or any given date and time.
Data Tags Improvements
We've made visual improvements to the Data Tags panel, making it easy to navigate and quickly find the desired action.
Transform Output
You can now manipulate and filter data inside actions before it becomes available as data tags, either by providing a list of "keys" you want to extract from an output, or by running custom JavaScript code.
"For Each Loop" Improvements
Two new actions have been added: Finish Loop Iteration and Stop Loop. The first action allows you to end the current iteration of a loop, while the second action breaks out of the loop entirely.
Download Files and Generate Download Links
With the Download File action, users can now download files that will be stored within the automation run to be used for subsequent automation actions.
The Generate Download Link allows users to create secure and time-limited links for downloading files which can be shared publicly with others.
Both of these features are designed to enhance the file management functionality, bringing more efficient and convenient ways to manage files inside automations.
Copy Files When Starting Another Automation
When you chain automations together, you can now make it copy all files from existing automation into the new one.
Field Mapping
The new action allows you to map Data Tags (variables) to specific values.
For example, given an automation with a dynamic {{$company_name}} that is different in every automation run, you can now build a map where based on the current company name it will return you the necessary bank account.
Other Improvements
As always, this release comes with dozens of quality of life improvements and bug fixes for a more efficient and streamlined user experience.
]]>We're excited to announce our biggest release yet with Automations.io 1.3, adding more integrations and major new features such as recording time and money savings, setting automation run outcomes, for each loop, automation chains and more.
You can find the previous Automations.io 1.2 release post here.
7 New Integrations
We keep investing into existing integrations too. With Invoiced alone we trippled the amount of automation actions you can do in this release.
Introducing For Each Loops
You can now run automation actions against many items with the new For Each Loop action.
As per the example above, whether the automation finds 1 or 20 overdue payments, it will loop through each those payments and send a payment email and SMS reminder to every customer.
Celebrate Your Wins 🎉
Don't forget to celebrate even the smallest wins! From now on, when you complete an automation with Human Tasks, we'll congratulate you with a confetti explosion and a random celebration GIF for a job well done!
Start Another Automation
When you want to break up large workflows or create common automations, you can now use the new Start Another Automation action.
Trigger and Action Preview
We've simplified and completely revamped the triggers and actions menu that now previews you the items you want to insert.
Record Time 🕐 and Money 💰 Savings
You build automations to avoid doing things manually, thus saving time and money along the way. With the new Record Savings action, you can now keep track how much time or money each automation run saves you.
Set Automation Run Outcomes
Let's say you have a "Refund Request" automation, that has a Human Task that requires a manual approval or rejection. Depending on the outcome of the task, the automation will do different things.
Previously, you could only see a total of refund requests you received by looking how many times the automation ran.
With the new Set Outcome action, you can now differentiate automation runs between each other.
Out of 4 successful automation runs, you can now see how many were approved or rejected – 3 approved, 1 rejected.
And you are free to create as many custom outcomes as you want.
New Automation Run Icons
We've also redesigned the automation run status icons, as well as introducing the mini version of the icons.
Other Improvements
- The Scheduled Start trigger now supports timezones.
- New {{datetime}} helper.
- We are releasing a beta of the new Run Code action, that allows you to run JavaScript inside your automations.
- Numerous UI and quality of life improvements when building automations.
- 🐞 Bug fixes
Ready to start your automation journey?
]]>We're excited to announce Automations.io 1.2 with 8 new integrations and many quality of life platform improvements.
You can find the previous Automations.io 1.1 release post here.
8 New Integrations
We also released new actions for existing Companies House, Invoiced, Lemlist and T2A integrations.
Preview Data Tags
When using data tags inside automation actions, such as $trigger.email, you can now easily preview the end result.
Human Task Updates
We've made improvements to make it easier to build and preview tasks.
Filter Automation Runs
You can now filter automation runs by their status.
Improved Audit History
The audit view of each automation run has been simplified and made easier to use.
Date Time Helper
There is a new {{now}} helper that allows you to work with date and time.
For example, using {{now "format YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"}} inside action will return the current time when the action is performed in the specified format, e.g. 2021-11-08 15:00:00.
You can also perform manipulation, such as adding or removing days and hours.
For example, let's say you are using Invoiced integration and you want to make every new invoice automatically due next month on the 15th day. You can now do this with {{now "endOf month; add 15 days"}}.
Other Improvements
- You will now have visibility over delayed automation runs. Automation runs are delayed when you have reached your monthly actions limit, or you have reached a limit of the number of automations you can start per minute.
- Trigger and action testing have been improved, and you will now see a warning if we believe something in the test result needs your attention.
- When building automation, we now dim the background to hide unnecessary distractions and highlight elements you can use at that moment.
- There's now a "Start Task" shortcut at the top of the task's page.
- An issue has been fixed where the action options window in the automation template could block the data tags menu.
Company director search in the UK with their associations and insolvency history can be a tedious and mundane task. While it's a critical process for most financial service providers, manual work is time-consuming and error-prone.
So if you're a regular visitor to Companies House or The Gazette for:
- company information
- directors and their associations
- insolvency notices
Then making use of automation could save you a lot of time and money.
For example, as a business loan provider (bridging, property, director's guarantee, etc.) that received a new application, you need to:
- Do a company health check and due diligence
- Find associated companies and insolvency history
- Download latest financial accounts
Your goal for the automation is to collect this data from Companies House and The Gazette for you, and then create a task (pictured below) for a person to review the information and make a decision.
What is automation?
First thing's first. Automation will not replace people and turn your business into robots. Instead, it will automate repetitive mundane tasks and use your teams' experience and skills for the rest. We call it:
Automation with a human touch.
We're against taking away human interaction and decision making.
By connecting people, systems and business processes together, automation will make your team work smarter and more efficient, free them up from routine, low-value tasks and allow them to focus on more important work.
How to automate workflows with Automations.io
Automations.io helps lenders, brokers, and financial services teams automate work to save time and increase productivity, without losing the human touch.
The best part? You don't need any coding experience, and it takes minutes to go live. Just choose a trigger (when a loan application is received), define actions (check Companies House, The Gazette, download financial accounts, create a task to review information), and the automation is ready!
Loan application automation
Going back to our example, we'll make the automation act as a catalyst that gets us to yes/no decision making step as quickly as possible.
Whether you receive loan applications via email or straight into your CRM, the first step would be to trigger the automation to start immediately when that happens.
Once the loan application is received, we know the company number and can use that to start our due diligence.
With a few clicks, we add automation actions to find the company at Companies House, pull general information and director's associations, and check The Gazette to discover whether any company officers or associated companies have insolvency history.
We also download the latest filed accounts on Companies House and can save it to your CRM or Google Drive.
Once we have all of that information, we create a task for a person to review it and decide whether the application is rejected or it can proceed further.
Our final automation workflow looks something like this.
Final thoughts
Because it takes minutes to get this up and running, and regardless if you're a small business owner or a team member in a bigger company, Automations.io can help you save time, money and cut down on busywork.
You can also connect and integrate tools and apps you already use. From CRMs, to credit check agencies, spreadsheets, Mailchimp, Slack, Google Drive, and many more.
With 100s of hours saved for our customers already, you're just 15 minutes away from starting your automation journey.
]]>Version 1.1 is now available and we're excited to introduce:
- the new human tasks interface
- inbound email automation
- AI (artificial intelligence) 🤖🧠 feature
- 4 new integrations
- manage access control who can launch each automation
And many quality of life improvements that will make using Automations.io every day even more enjoyable.
These are just a few highlights from numerous fixes and enhancements we've done with over 12,000 lines of new code added in this release.
New human tasks interface
You can now easily define your business processes as a set of tasks with checklists and approval requests, to guide your employees with the next steps and ensure every step of the process is completed before proceeding further.
Inbound email automation
You can now automate what happens when an inbound email is received.
Let's say you receive inbound emails when customers apply for a loan, so instead of manually copy-pasting email contents to the CRM or a spreadsheet, this process can be fully automated.
No more manual mistakes ❌ and typos!
The first AI 🤖🧠 feature
We've been planning to add artificial intelligence features since the day we launched, but we've been focusing our roadmap on customer requests.
Now, with a real customer use case, we're adding our first built-in AI action - Detect Language!
Using natural language processing, Detect Language determines the dominant language in a given text.
For example, suppose you have a support inbox for English and French-speaking customers but want to reply with a templated email in the correct language. In that case, the new feature can detect which language the customer used in their email and then respond with the template in the same language.
4 New Integrations
- Send real postal mail with PC2Paper.
- Send invoices and get paid faster with Invoiced.
- Send documents for eSignature with Legalesign.
- Send cold emails and automate follow-ups with Lemlist.
Access management
You can now limit which users can see and start each automation.
Automation execution names
You can now give custom names to each automation run (also known as execution).
For example, suppose you have Employee Onboarding automation. In that case, you can give it a name every time it runs for a new employee, helping you distinguish between multiple executions of the same automation.
Other Improvements
- When manually starting automation with multiple triggers, you can now select which trigger you want to start with
- User interface improvements to help with automation building
- Non-administrator users can now stop automations they started
- Copy button for webhooks URLs, web forms, API endpoints, etc
- Replace text helper
Companies of any size now can easily start automating repetitive work to free up their teams from routine, low-value tasks to focus on activities of much higher value to the business. No longer is automation reserved for enterprise companies with dedicated teams of developers.
Here is a list of 10 things we believe every debt management and insolvency company should automate, regardless of their size or software already in use.
1) Welcome sequence
You need to capture interest and build trust, and the welcome sequence is a great way to do that. You can show yourself being corporate and serious, or you can be funny and friendly. Regardless, you must always introduce yourself and your brand to the customer.
Once a new lead comes in, immediately send them a text or an email and explain why they should trust you, what to expect next and engage them by asking a question.
Your welcome sequence should be automated, sending multiple emails and texts over a few days, guiding them through the process of becoming debt-free.
2) Contact centre integration
The days of manually assigning inbound leads across team members are hopefully over. It's even more challenging with remote teams since you don't want to assign a new lead to someone who'll be on a call for the next hour.
With a constant flow of new leads, you should be using a modern contact centre platform. You can then put new leads into a high priority bucket and present them to agents as soon as they're ready to make the next call. This means you can catch your leads while they're still reading the "thank you" page on your website, increasing your conversion rates.
This process is easily scalable and doesn't require tracking individual agent's availability, lunch hours or days off. It works great, regardless if you have a team of 5 or 50 agents. But make sure you avoid automated dialling and dial your inbound leads in preview mode, giving agents time to prepare for a call.
3) Best time to call
If the new lead doesn't answer the phone, you should always follow up with a text message and ask for the best time to call them.
Ideally, you should offer customers a mobile-friendly link to pick the best time to call. Once submitted, it should be synchronised with your CRM by creating a task or creating a future callback directly in your contact centre platform.
4) Document generation
Please, don't ever fill out templated documents manually. You've most likely seen first-hand where a copy-paste job went wrong, with an incorrect date, address or name ending up on a document.
What you should do instead is create a templated document, with fields such as {{date}} and {{customer-name}}. Then, based on a customer's reference number, you should have a new document automatically generated for you with those two fields replaced with actual values.
Additionally, the generated document can be automatically sent to an email address on the customer's file, rather than someone doing all these steps manually.
Where necessary, you should create an approval task for someone to review the generated document before it's automatically sent to the customer.
5) Customer status change notifications
Your teams should always be aware in real-time when leads are progressing along the funnel or when there are material changes to your existing customers.
For example, a team might be waiting for a signed Letter of Authority (LOA) before approaching the creditors. As soon as the signed letter comes in, your team should receive instant notification via chat or email. Then, a new task should be waiting for them with details on the next steps to do.
6) Document collection
Stop asking customers to send you documents to info@yourcompany.co mailbox and for some unfortunate employee to go through that pile and put it in the correct folders.
Provide your customers with a secure link to take pictures or upload documents via their mobiles. Once uploaded, these should automatically end up in the customer's folder in your CRM, Google Drive or your document management system.
7) Automate valuations and repetitive work
With Individual Voluntary Arrangements (IVA), insolvency practitioners often need various proofs, such as council tax band charges or a car valuation.
Don't forget we live in the future, so instead of someone gathering all this information manually, you can have a digital robot 🤖 (not kidding!) carry out the same work. We're serious, digital robots are a thing these days, and they're much easier to run than you might think. They can save all that information into a PDF document and put it in the right place for you.
8) Task management
How many times have you seen teams miss tasks or pass requests between departments via emails, which are then lost and forgotten without any accountability? What about managers being unaware of the outstanding amount of work in their teams?
You need to manage recurring work in a structured way with tasks, ideally created automatically based on system or customer events.
Did a customer miss a payment? Start a workflow that will send a reminder email and create a task to handle this.
Mapping out and automating business processes will make sure nothing ever gets missed, and outstanding work can be easily managed and tracked.
9) Refer a friend
In the personal insolvency space, asking customers to refer a friend is a great way to acquire new leads at an affordable price. Many companies offer £100 - £150 for customers to refer their friends, which is often cheaper than existing marketing channels, but it also greatly benefits the customer.
Create an automated campaign that will send "refer a friend" text or email on days 1, 30 and 90 after converting your lead.
10) Customer review invitations
We're surprised at the number of companies missing out on this simple trick to increase website traffic and improve their business results.
Did you know that customers search for your business online and check your company reviews, and if they can't find any, it hurts your conversion rates and search engine rankings?
Not only that, but online reviews make up 15% of how Google SEO ranks your business in search results.
But while you might be sending out review invitations already, it's not enough!
Whether you receive a positive or negative review, it's important to respond to that review to show your customers and search engines your commitment to customer satisfaction.
33% of customers that received a response after posting negative feedback turned around and posted a positive review, and 34% deleted the original negative review.
Not only that, but Google officially says:
When you reply to reviews, it shows that you value your customers and their feedback. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your business visibility...
Interesting, huh!?
Make sure you automatically send customer review invitations after providing the customer with a solution.
Great, but where to start?
We hope you've learned something new! Here's the list again:
- Welcome sequence
- Contact centre integration
- Best time to call
- Document generation
- Customer status change notifications
- Document collection
- Automate valuations and repetitive work
- Task management
- Refer a friend
- Customer review invitations
To start implementing this, speak with the person responsible for technology in your company to understand the costs and how long it'll take.
Another option is to look at a solutions provider specialising in business automation.
There's also Automations.io, a platform focused on helping debt management & insolvency companies automate manual work, save time and increase productivity. It complements your existing tools, so there's no need to replace your current systems, and you can go live in days instead of months of software development.
We are excited to launch Automations.io, a no-code platform to make it easier to automate day-to-day work, whether you're running a startup, business or doing your daily job.
