Halo Implementation Series – Workflow – Video 7

hey everyone and welcome to another installment in the uh in the Halo implementation series with me again today I I have the legendary Morgan who is Mr Halo as we as we all know by now um and what we're going to do is we're going to talk today a little bit around workflows what they are how they work when to use them um and then in in the following videos from from this we'll then talk about you know ticket approval processes and you know how to use flows and tickets and things like that but for this particular video we'll cover off workflows and what they are so hey Morgan how you doing and uh thanks for joining me yeah thanks for having me Chris always a pleasure it's been a couple of weeks since our last video so uh yeah looking forward to pressing forward with some of the workflows and ticket configuration so yeah absolutely looking forward to it cool yeah um as you mentioned workflows so we've seen in uh some of the previous videos that um we we've looked at our ticket type configuration we've had a look at actions how we can sort of progress a ticket towards resolution we've had a look at how we can track our slas and how we can manipulate some of the information on tickets based on our ticket rules uh what we'll have a look at today is how we sort of start tying some of those processes together and how we can actually drive agents and help them perform the right actions when they need to be performed so let me share my screen okay yeah I think this one's going to be good I think a lot of people ask about um you know workflows because I think especially if they're coming in from from other tools that use things called workflow rules um yes it's a little bit of a confusion as to what workflows are within within Halo so it'd be good if you could absolutely yeah talk about what they are and how they work so yeah for sure um yeah sort of when I was doing onboardings more regularly it was quite a frequent question that would come up and I think a point of consideration is to understand that a workflow in another system is not directly equate to a ticket workflow in Halo is a first pass when you're initially setting Halo PSA up you can really consider your workflows as restricting the available actions on a ticket at any given point um there are other mechanisms that we can utilize with Halo PSA such as notifications uh ticket defaults slas ticket rules as we mentioned that all compose The Wider workflow of a ticket in a more General sense but when we're talking about workflow configuration in Halo PSA we're really talking about restricting actions at a given point so let's take a look at how we set that up okay so as always we'll go to our configuration panel and and within here within our tickets module we have our workflows section now this is a list of all of the workflows that you'll have out of the box and we've got some core basic workflows in the system including a triage workflow opportunity workflow and so on um let's take a look at our opportunity workloads I think that's quite a good example of how workflows are configured so let's click in so our workflows are composed of two tabs we have our flowchart Tab and we have our details Tab and the details tab is where we specify our sort of high level miscellaneous information against the workflow in question and obviously give the workflow a name we can specify any further notes detailing what this workflow is trying to achieve we can show or hide that in the list of workflows so we can Mark our workflow as inactive if you don't want to use it today you can come in and make it active and sort of plug it in later on down the line um and below that we'll come back onto this allowed actions section but below that we have this stages table now if I do jump over to an opportunity very quickly which I can get to from the CRM module we'll see in this ticket and we'll see in any ticket that has a workflow applied to it we we have this sort of progress bar along the top here now this progress bar is actually composed of those workflow stages so if I jump back over we'll see that in our opportunity workflow we have the awaiting qualification stage we have our proposal slash quotation stage negotiation opportunity one and so on and that actually equates to these options along the top awaiting qualification proposal quotation so on and it's the workflow stages in Halo PSA that allow you to establish almost like progress bar for the ticket how close are you towards the end of the journey for that ticket in this case how far along down the sales process down our sales pipeline have we actually reached okay so those are cool so those are stages um very similar to stages are our workflow steps and to have a look at our workflow steps we'll go into the flowchart tab now we'll see here in our flowchart we have a series of boxes and we have some lines linking the boxes together so each of these boxes are our workflow steps um and we'll see within our boxes within our workflow steps we have some options in here so we have qualify at the start then raise quote quote send and so on and so this is how we start to restrict the available actions that are present on a ticket at any given moment so carrying on with the opportunity workflow let's see if we can find a fresh opportunity here maybe let's just create one I think there must be out this one yeah okay cool um yeah so as as with pretty much everything else in Halo PSA you want to create a new entity of something we'll click the new button in the top right I know we haven't touched on CRM yet we'll definitely come back to this later on in the video series but uh just as a sort of brief introduction uh to the opportunity section of Halo PSA uh the first thing you'll notice is how similar this is to your existing ticket configuration on the left you have your contact details and then the main portion of the screen has that ticket form that opportunity form in this case yep yeah and I think well as you said we'll get to we'll get to kind of sales and opportunities I mean foreign intensive purposes opportunities are just tickets right they they pretty much tickets in the same ways that service desk ticket is yeah I mean there are there's some special features uh around opportunities that aren't applicable to uh tickets or to projects um but as you say for the most part they're very similar it's very common a very familiar screen that we have here with our activity feed our opportunity information contact details and our actions are on the top so um notice how we don't yet have the ability to create a quote on this opportunity what we do have is the ability to qualify and hopefully that makes sense as well you wouldn't want to be raising quotes on Ops before you qualify the opportunity um or similarly you wouldn't want to be creating a project from an opportunity before you've raised the quote and all of that so that's that's the motivation for creating ticket opportunity project workflows in Halo it's to only give your techs the options that they need to be working with at the point in the process so let's jump back to the workflow very quickly and we see there are this a wasting qualification step this this initial box and in here we have a single option that is qualify and that is going to lead us down to the second box so uh how this equates to the experience when working on a ticket is I'll perform the qualify action and we'll see a couple of things have happened first and foremost we've moved from our awaiting qualification stage to our proposal quotation stage so we've moved one step along the progress bar and secondly our qualify action has disappeared and has been replaced with the raise quote action so how have we actually achieved that well firstly uh looking at this sort of progressing along the stages we can actually see that within our steps which I can get into just by clicking the edit option in the top right uh within our steps we can actually allocate a stage to them so you can have multiple steps per stage uh in this case I I think each step is mapped directly to a stage um it's just bearing in mind that to progress along that progress bar to move from one stage to the next we need to go from one step that is at in this case stage one and move to a new step that's marked to stage two so that's how we're moving along the progress bar and then in terms of the actions that are present namely qualify and now in this case raise quote we can see that at this initial step the only action that is available in the flowchart is the qualify action and we can see that by performing that qualify action we're going to move to the next step and that next step only has the raise quote action within that step so we don't have every action available at the same time you only have the actions that are available within the given step that you are at at any given point um finally we can actually see that there's two additional options here um however we don't see those in our flow charts the reason for that is because those have been added as actions that are available at any step in the workflow so these are these are actions that you're always going to be able to perform on the ticket but aren't actually helping you drive the ticket forward in any way so for example I could add private node at him yeah so you could you could effectively what you're saying in here is you could you could lose the opportunity without qualifying it right or yeah yeah on to to um the the quote stage so you could just kind of go well I'm not going to get to that to quoting them because actually maybe the customers called up and said actually we've changed our mind we don't want to you know we don't want to go ahead with us anymore so you want to be able to close the opportunity at that point or lose the opportunity without going through all the stages to to get to that closed stage yeah and and you know you could lose an opportunity at any point in that process yeah which is why that's an action that's always going to be available yeah cool um and I suppose the the other point to consider when you're thinking about adding actions that are allowed at any step is you really want to make this flowchart as simple as possible uh Euro you only want to put options in here that actually drive you forward to the next step um you know for example I could add the private note action in here and I would do that by adding to my workflow actions and selecting allow agent actions so those are the buttons at the top of our ticket which print I can pick private note save that and now that'll be in here it's not going to drive us forward in the workflow at all but I could repeat that process in this step and this step and this step the whole way through and you can imagine that's quite a tedious task whereas it's much more straightforward to go to the details Tab and simply add that in as an action that's allowed at any step so yeah yeah so by adding it into the the first step in the flowchart you're saying that it it would then somebody would have to click on that in order to get to to the next step well um in this case no no okay so uh let's let's save it and let's get rid of it from our details tab so by the way sorry the questions I'm asking you I I know the answers I'm just asking because this is what I get I get asked a lot of times and I'm sure the people in the in the implementation are going to be asking these kind of questions so I'm asking them on on our um our viewers behalfs because I know they're going to ask those kind of questions so absolutely yeah yeah well then let's put it to the test right so we've added private note in as an action in the first step and only in the first step but we've put no logic into the workflow to say that when you click private no move to another step so let's go ahead and raise a new one so now we see we have our private note option at the top now let me perform that right no foreign TY but nothing in workflow-wise has happened we're still at the first stage we haven't progressed we've still got the qualify action now if I perform the qualify action that private note option has disappeared as has the qualify now that's because we were here at the first step where we had our two options plus those available at any step I performed private note but we haven't gone anywhere so we're still in this first step still at the screen box um where we still have the qualify action available to us yeah I've just performed that taking us to the next step where the private note option is no longer present and hence we only have the actions that are present in this step namely raise quote plus those available at any step okay yeah so okay so for private notes you'd want to be putting your private notes available at all stamps yeah or in any step whatever you want whatever you've put in there um because you're probably going to want to add a private note at every stage or every step of of the opportunity so you're going to want to make sure that you have that to show up in all steps rather than just in that um that initial step exactly yeah yeah that's it yeah okay that makes sense yeah um so to quickly recap um workflows ticket workflows opportunity workflows and Halo PSA uh constitute the actions that are available at a given point in the tickets life cycle opportunities life cycle um workflows are composed of stages that equate to the progress bar along the top of our ticket and within our flowchart we have steps where we're building out the logic of the workflow within steps we have actions and actions can take us from one step to the next hence allowing our agents to only have the actions that are needed when they're needed okay that makes sense yeah cool and for the purpose of our of our viewers who who are watching this so and I've had this kind of question I guess before and you'll be gonna be good to get your take on it so obviously there's different lines between each each um Step of which there are different colors as well as that on stage between stage four and five there's two different lines doing two different things so do you want to kind of talk around what those do and and you know what the colors mean if if anything I I don't think the colors mean anything um what can be meaningful is you can imagine these workflows becoming quite complex quite uh almost like a spider's web of uh one step going potentially going to five others with five different actions and it can all get rather messy um one point to bear in mind is if you hover over a line and you'll actually be able to see the direction in which it's heading so we can see that as our line is Flowing from uh step two to step three this action is going to take us in that direction now of course this is a fairly basic workflow where each step more or less has one single option to it but you can within a given step have multiple options that take you to the same place so here this negotiation step in our opportunity workflow has two separate actions in here now one of the actions is this opportunity one action uh which is actually a button at the top of the opportunity and that allows your sales team to Mark the opportunity as one uh if the customer picks up the phone and gives you a call or sends you an email and says yeah all good please proceed um but and again I'm not going to go into this in too much detail but there is an inbuilt quote approval mechanism in Halo PSA such that quotes can be or links to quotes can be sent to end users and those end users can view those quotes on the self-service portal actually approve or reject those quotes providing in any signature if they're accepting now if the customer does accept the quote and provide that e-signature by the self-service portal we actually have a system automation happening behind the scenes that marks that quote as being approved and we can actually tie that into our workflow so um again as sort of just getting up to speed with Halo PSA just sort of uh figuring out the platform your first introduction to workflows don't think of them as more than restricting the buttons at the top of the screen but do bear in mind that when you come back to this for a sort of a second pass once you're more familiar with Halo PSA and Halo PSA workflows it is worth bearing in mind that workflows aren't only composed of agent actions those buttons along the top but there are actually other triggers that we can have behind the scenes that drive our workflow forward so we can have a customer approving the quote on the sales service portal to automatically progress that workflow to the opportunity one stage and then if the sales order has been created from that quote again automatically move us forward and we've also got workflow rules based on approval processes which we'll talk more about soon and so workflows in Halo can be driven by more than just agent actions but to start with just play about with the agent actions to get an understanding of the the flows that's what I'd say and and that's that's really good I mean in terms of you know like you're saying because obviously if a um you know if a customer has accepted a a an opportunity um you you want that system action effectively to progress that um that opportunity because otherwise your engineer or your um your salesperson or whoever is going to have to go in and actually perform that step themselves and you might as well just have the quote kind of go well it's been approved so you don't need to worry about the step we're just going to jump to the next step in the up so yeah it's yeah exactly okay good yeah so I think that makes a lot of sense um hopefully that makes a lot of sense to um to people watching this I know that um you know if if it isn't making any sense or people want to kind of go through this in in more detail um you can reach out to me you can leave a you know leave a comment below um you know I I can kind of talk you through this and help you with a lot of the stuff um you know or we can kind of Reach Out directly to um to Halo for this so yeah yeah absolutely I mean I'd say this is uh one of the most complex parts of the basic setup of the system right um everything we've seen so far is pretty self-explanatory you you know if you've used a PSA system before you're going to know what tickets are you're going to know what ticket types are you're going to know what slas are you're going to know what a ticket form is um you're going to understand the concept of actions now we're getting into the weeds a little bit and you can you know the flip side of this is you can take these workflows an extremely long way and you can I've seen some really creative implementations of workflows in my time at Halo so it's a very powerful engine but I agree it can be a little bit daunting initially um so so my advice would be take it slow one step at a time really try to understand what's happening within the workflow um you know when you're getting a trial and you're having a look at the the default setup um and yeah as as Chris mentioned uh if you do need further assistance then someone like Chris or myself be happy to help yeah excellent great thanks Morgan I think that's uh that's really good um this is you know the purpose of these videos is not to go into you know I guess huge amount of detail so more more just to give a very high level overview on what these are and I think you've he kind of covered that off really nicely of you know what what is a workflow how does it work how to configure it yeah so um yeah so thank you very much really appreciate that always happy to join a call with You Chris absolutely well thanks uh thanks Morgan and um we look forward to seeing you certainly on the next video as well um and anyone watching this look forward to seeing you um on the next video so thanks for watching and uh we'll see you soon thanks for watching guys thanks cheers bye