Required Permissions: Forms, Automations
When using the Hona Webchat and VoiceAI to capture leads, it is common to want to be able to create the lead in your CRM of choice in addition to Hona itself. This article will walk you through the basics of how to set up an Automation in Hona that will do this every time as well as offer some tips that will unlock some extra functionality.
Setting Up a Custom Automation
Hona’s Automations is an event-based platform that allows you to determine extra steps to take any time something happens in Hona. That means that whenever a Form is submitted, in addition to Hona’s default functionality (lead creation, CRM writeback, etc), we can also take steps like automatically pushing into an external CRM.
First, we will navigate to the Automations page and click the + button to create a new automation.
Selecting the Event
Next we will choose the Category that we want to start our automation. For the webchat form, we will select Form, and for VoiceAI we will select Call. After that we can select the Event that will start the trigger (Form Submitted or Call Ended, respectively).
We can then select a specific form or voice agent. This step is optional, but recommended because selecting specific instance has two distinct advantages:
The automation will only happen when the specific instance in question is submitted/called
Allows us to pull in specific information from the form/agent in our actions
Choosing Our Criteria
Each event in Hona has a set of criteria. The criteria serve a similar purpose to instance selection: they filter the events fired and allow us to pull in information. Since we are working on lead creation, we will want to select “Any” for each of our criteria because the event will not be associated with an already existing lead or project client.
Configuring the Action
Once our event is fully configured, we can choose our action(s). If your integration is compatible, an option will appear that will guide you through the minimum fields required to create your lead. If you do not see an option for your CRM, there are two options still available to you:
Use the “Custom Request” action to interact directly with your CRMs API, though this does require some technical expertise, or
Reach out to our team at Hona— we are always working to expand our integrations with external CRMs, and yours may be next!
Once you select your integration, you will be provided with a simple form. The form will have a set of fields that correspond to the available fields in your CRM. We will use SmartAdvocate for our example here. The UI will provide you with the required fields. You may be able to save the action without a valid value for these fields, but the action will consistently fail unless those fields are present and valid.
Pulling Dynamic Content Into the Action
In most cases, we will want the content of our lead to be different every time a new person submits our form. We can ensure that this happens by using the “Piped Text” functionality that is provided by the {+} button. This will allow us to select specific questions from our form and automatically bring in the user’s answer to our question.
Once we are done, our action will look something like this:
We can then click Save. Once we have done that, the only thing remaining is to rename our Automation and Activate it so it can get to work!
Using Conditions to Take Additional Actions
While our webchat form allows us to not create leads when certain questions are unanswered, we may want to take additional actions when leads are created if a respondent’s answers indicate that they are a promising or urgent lead. In our sample case, we will add a question that asks the user if they want to be contacted immediately.
Next, in our automation we will add another Action, this time selecting the Condition option.
Then, we will add a “Rule” and select the question from our form. Once we select the question, we will provided with a set of operators (we’ll select =), and then we can select our desired answer.
Now our automation has a condition! This means that when the automation fires, it will always create a lead in LeadDocket, but we can choose to take additional steps. Any action that happens after the condition (say, sending an Email to your lead capture team) will only happen if the condition passes.
Passing Mapped Values to an Integration
Sometimes we want to map data that is not a direct user input— either it is an ID internal to our integration, or we want to hide values from the user seeing the form. Using this functionality, there are several things that we can do based off of the user’s response to our form:
Creating leads with different case types
Automatically setting the status or substatus of a case
Changing the severity or chase urgency for a lead on creation
For our example, we will be working with a LeadDocket integration, setting a “Severity Level” value, but the principles work for other use cases as well.
In our case, we want to change the “Severity Level” of our lead according to our user’s response to the question “How badly were you injured?”. To do so, we will go to the Form Editor and use the pencil to the right of the options to edit their values:
If the person filling out the form wasn’t hurt at all, we will set our severity level to 6 (the lowest we have available), whereas if it was serious we would set the value to 1 (our highest level).
Once we have created this mapping, we now have the option to either select “Answer Label” (which would bring in the text ‘Honestly I wasn’t hurt at all) or “Answer Value” (which would bring in 6, our mapped value).
