Great question, Brady!

Notification Workflows is a highly customizable feature that sends a notification, or series of notifications, whenever a specific event takes place on your phone system.

It basically boils down to “When ____ happens, send me ____.”

Notification Workflows are an incredibly useful tool for handling emergency situations, getting quick responses to angry customers, or even just making sure you don’t miss an important voicemail.

For example, let’s say you want to make sure your billing department replies right away any time someone leaves them an agitated voicemail. With Notification Workflows, you can instantly send emails to the whole team to make sure they get their butts in gear and investigate the issue.

Notification Workflows are fully customizable, so you can decide which events you’d like to be notified about and what type of notification will work best for you.

If you’re out of the office, email or SMS is usually the way to go. Alternatively, if you expect to be at your desk when a notification comes in, consider using a Chrome push notifications for instant visibility on your computer.

Using the new and improved Notification Workflows section of our My.FluentCloud web portal is like reading a choose your own adventure book. Let’s go through an example.

Imagine you’re a customer service support manager and you’d like to know every time a frustrated caller leaves your support queue without speaking to an agent so you can call them back right away instead of leaving the situation unresolved.

Step 1: Select the event you’d like to receive notifications for.

In our example, you’d want to select the “Queue exited from” event so you receive a notification any time a caller hangs up before they speak to an agent.

Step 2: Select the specific queue you’d like tied to your event.

Your account may have multiple queues such as a Sales Queue or a Billing Questions Queue, but for our example we want to select the Support Queue.

Step 3: Select the notification action that works best for you.

Since most customer support managers are constantly checking their inbox anyway, we’ll select email as our action. Then all that’s left to do is select the times when you want your workflow active and the email where you’d like your notifications delivered.

(Optional) Step 4: If you’d like multiple people to be notified about an event, for instance your whole support team when a caller exits your queue, you can click Add New Action and send multiple notifications.

That’s it! All the complex integrations and information exchanges happen under the hood so you can focus on running your business.

911 Emergency Call Alerts

We hope no one at your company will ever need to dial 911. However, as your communications provider, it's our job to make sure you have peace of mind knowing you’re prepared for that possibility.

With Notification Workflows, you can instantly notify your team about 911 calls made at any of your locations so employees can get to safety or check in on the situation. We recommend SMS messages for this particular workflow, but feel free to also send emails or Chrome push notifications to make absolutely sure everyone knows the situation.

Maintain Customer Satisfaction

Here at FluentStream, we use Notification Workflows in numerous ways as part of our award-winning Support Experience.

Queue SLA Limit Exceeded:
Waiting on hold for too long is the most common complaint for a majority of customer support teams. With Notification Workflows, you can alert your team any time a customer’s hold time exceeds your queue SLA so someone can get on the case right away.

Survey Score Submitted:
Extremely useful for teams with Post-Call Surveys on their queues, this Notification Workflow alerts your managers each time a new survey is submitted. If the score is below par, you can review the call right away and either reach out to the customer for a follow-up or use it as a learning opportunity and show the agent where they went wrong.

Negative Voicemail Sentiment Analysis:
We’ve all unsuspectingly opened a voicemail to find a loud, angry message from a customer that we then must scramble to address. But it doesn’t have to go down like that. With a Notification Workflow, you can find out right away if a new voicemail is going to be negative or frustrated. That way, you can approach the situation both mentally prepared and ready to make that customer your new top priority.

Please feel free to shamelessly steal any or all of our ideas for your Notification Workflows. If you need help, give us a call. We’d be happy to help you out and then let you take all the credit for your support team’s improved performance.

On the Go? No Problem-o!

Now that we’ve covered how helpful Notification Workflows are when things are going wrong, let’s talk about when things are going right.

Say you’re out of the office or on an extended vacation. Rather than forwarding calls to your cell phone or getting a new email every time someone leaves you a voicemail, you can use Notification Workflows to make sure you’re only alerted when an important customer has a complaint.

Alternatively, if you do want to stay plugged into every new call, voicemail, or development back at the office, then:

1. We’d recommend reading Learn to Relax: A Practical Guide to Easing Tension and Conquering Stress by Mike George
   
   
2. We’d also recommend setting up SMS alerts for missed calls, voicemails, survey submissions, your queue agents auto-pausing because they haven’t answered a call in so long--everything you need to make sure your team stays sharp while you’re gone.

However you prefer to be notified, we give you the workflow tools you need to create the information stream of your dreams.

The best thing about Notification Workflows is that they’re included with every FluentStream account for no additional cost and can be accessed right from your my.fluentcloud.com web portal.

If you’d like more information or need help setting up Notification Workflows for your business, our Client Experience Team is available 24x7 to held a hand. Contact them at support@fluentstream.com or call 303-GO-CLOUD and select Option 2.