Autotask Automatically Update Account Alert when customer on Hold

Hey everyone, Chris Timm here from Sondela Consulting. In this video, I'm going to talk about a really cool thing that we can do inside um Auto Task and how we can automate the process of putting a customer on hold automatically adding an alert to that customer so that when our engineers come to create the ticket, they have an alert to say that the customer is on hold. Now, normally this is something that you manually have to do in order task. Um, but there's some tools out there that we can use and I'll kind of go through, um, just show how some of this is done in this video. So, uh, let's go and take a look at how this works.

So, the very first thing we want to do, um, if we look at our company. So, here we have our company of Able Manufacturing and we currently have the classification icon set as block our uh, customer. So, this is really saying this is our block. Nothing's wrong with this customer. Um, if we create a ticket, we can go and create a ticket as per normal.

No alerts, no notifications, nothing pop up. Um, oh, except for contact Pam for any help. That's probably still in there. Um, but yeah, we can uh there will be some notifications. Yeah, contact Pam for help.

So you can see there are some in there actually um which is is things that we can now use um and and append to that if we've got a uh you know a customer that's gone on hold or something like that. So let's let's have a quick look at how this would work. So if we come into our alerts under our company alerts we can see oh there we go. So yeah we have under our new ticket alert contact Pam for any help. Now, when we adding an alert when a customer goes on hold, we don't want to remove what's there already, right?

Because that's obviously a note that somebody has put on that when we when we log a ticket for this customer, we need to speak to Pam, whatever. So, you know, we don't want to then go and override that with a big warning saying that the customer is on hold. So, we want to just keep that note that's there already. And we can do that quite easily by just simply clicking on the edit button. Come into here and we can change this customer to on hold.

And when I click save, what you will see happen within a couple of seconds this customer the account alerts will change and we now have added a new alert to this uh to this customer that says the company is on hold. Do not provide support. So if our engineers are going to come in here and they're going to say new, we now have as well as that contact PAM for any help. We have this saying do not provide support. We've also date stamped it as well.

So now our engineers will know that on that particular date is when that was added. Um and we can then obviously when this customer then does pay and come back into a good status uh we can have that automatically removed. Now, let's go and do that. So, maybe the customer is now paid. We want to take them off hold for whatever reason.

We can simply click back into edit. We can change this back into a block customer. Click on save. And what you will see happen now, if we go into the three dots and go into account alerts, we can see that that alert of us saying that the customer was on hold has now been removed. And it's only removed that section.

It hasn't removed the other notes that were there already. So, how does all of this work? How do we get kind of all of this to be fully automated? Well, there's a couple of ways that this happens. So, the very first thing we have to do is every time a ticket is updated or a new ticket is created, we're going to trigger a web hook.

So, auto task allows us to actually set up web hooks. If we come into admin, go into extensions and integrations, then we come here under other extensions and tools, and you can see we have the ability to set up web hooks. And here is our company web hook that is uh including all of those fields, but it's also triggering on any field that we have inside our web hook. Now, one of the things that happens in Autotask, these web hooks are not easy to create. There's no like new button in here that you've just got to go and create a web hook. you actually have to develop these through the API.

You have to use um you know post certain things into the API in order to create these web hooks. I so happen to have created a little application that actually does that for me. So um what will happen in here if I just run this you know I can come in here and I can uh me just delete this one. Make sure I delete the right one. Yeah.

So, I can just come in here, put some information in here, [music] and then I can do it's probably not the right one. And and when I click create web hook, this will go away and actually create the web hook for us and will ask us what fields we want to firstly alert on and what fields we want to include. This will go away and give us all of that information. So there you go. I can trigger on any one of these fields or I can trigger on all the fields.

I can also include all the fields when I output my web hook. And what that will simply do is that will then write those web hooks and create them here in to um into auto task. That is the only tricky part. You do have to have some kind of application that's going to do that for you. Um there is no easy way to do this in um in auto task.

Now once we have that open we are then using a tool called N8N. And N8N is the tool that we are using to uh to trigger this. So for example, this is our workflow. And what this does is it receives information in from that web hook. So if we double click on this, um what we probably need to do is look at the executions.

If we double click on this, we can see that here's the information that was passed to us by that web hook. So in here, we've got all the fields that we need that we can look to see if that field exists. So really all we're doing on the web hook here is we're saying you know is the classification turned on to on hold. So we're coming in here and we're saying is this on hold? If it is then what we're doing is we're saying yep if it is on hold we come up here onto our true branch and we go and we say you know get the company alerts if there are any alerts.

Um if there's no if no alerts exists then we just create a brand new alert. If there's already an alert that exists, then we append to it. And um and you can see in here, we're just appending to that alert. And that was why when we had that please contact Pamela, for example, and we'll run this again just to show you. Um so we've still got this please contact Pam for any help.

If we come into here and we change this to on hold again, you will see that it'll actually trigger this this runbook or this uh workflow I should say. And you can see we've now added the uh the company information in there. So if we go and look in here, you should see the next thing that pops up in a couple of minutes. There it is. And now we can see that what it's done is it's come up this branch because it says was it on hold?

Yes. So we did change it to an on hold status. It then says okay is there already an existing alert? If there is if there is then it comes down here. So you can see it's ticked these boxes which means it's come down this leg to actually append that alert.

If we took this away. So let's just actually change this a little bit. Let's come into here and let's leave that as on hold for now. Let's change this manually. And let's put nothing in here.

Save this. And then let's change this back to red. And now what we're going to do is we are going to change it. So you can see it's gone up the top route and then down onto this leg. Um if we now go back into here and we change it again.

And let's change it again to edit. Change this into on hold. And now because we have no uh account alerts, no notifications, anything in here. When we click on save, what this will effectively do, it will now create that same um that same alert. And this is all this has done is it's now come up and it's going to go up this route.

So if we look at the next one that comes up, you will see it's gone up this route which said, you know, no other alert already exists. So we come up here, we then create the alert rather than append to the alert. And then the alert we've we've created is that there's an alert created for this particular company. Cool. So of course then if we come in here and we change the classification back to something other than on hold.

So if we change this back, let's change them back to a block our client. And what we should see in a couple of seconds is that this will run now. And this is going to come down a different path in our workflow. And you can see in here it says, is the classification set to on hold? Well, no, because it's now gone back to a block hour.

And you'll actually see that what this has done is it's come into the alerts and it's removed that alert. So N has come down here. It's removed the alert. It's then kind of followed this path where it said, "Yep, I can go ahead and delete this alert." And I can delete the whole thing. If there was already some stuff in there like please contact Pamela, it would have come down this path and then made the decision on here of what it's supposed to do.

So we can really really easily build um uh these these sorts of workflows, these kind of um automations to automate pretty much anything we like um within uh within Autotask. So, um I'm going to be doing a whole series on a bunch of NAN um automations and integrations and how we can automate a lot of these processes uh within um within Auto Task. So, there's a few things coming. Um you know, we we're going to basically be having, you know, the triage process. I'm going to kind of go through some of the stuff around CIPP.

So you're getting an idea of of some of the things that we can actually do with N8N and auto task. So thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. Uh and I really do appreciate your time. If there's anything you want to see or any questions you have, feel free to to uh ask me.

And if you've enjoyed this video, I would really appreciate a like and subscribe. And uh thank you very much again for watching. And I look forward to seeing you on the next video.