Automated Playbooks
Playbooks help you automate internal customer management, fire alerts for in-need accounts, and engage customers.
Playbooks help you automate common Customer Success needs by performing a series of actions (e.g. fire a risk indicator, send an email, create a task) on Vitally Objects that meet certain requirements.
Each action in a playbook is applied at a defined schedule based on when the playbook was first activated on the account/user.
How To | How to (visual) |
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Below we dive deeper into how to choose your filters, frequency, re-enrollment, actions, waiting periods, and more. |  |
Choose the limit of how many times the Object can enroll into the playbook over a specific timeframe.
There are three options:
As "OBJECT" match | At most X time(s) | At most X time(s) every X days |
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Accounts/Users/Orgs or Objects (notes, task, custom objects, etc) will run as they match. If an Account matches on January 1st, unmatches later that day and then rematches January 2nd it will re-run through the playbook. | Control the amount times that an Object run through the life of a playbook. If set to at most 1 times: If an Account matches on January 1st, unmatches later that day, and then rematches on January 2nd, it will not re-run. | Control the amount times in a timeframe that an Object run through the life of a playbook. If set to at most 1 times every 7 days: If an Account matches on January 1st, unmatches later that day, and then rematches on January 2nd, it will not re-run. If it rematches January 8th, it will then re-enroll.
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Before you start creating your playbook you want to make sure you're choosing the correct triggers. Your triggers are what controls what goes in and out of your playbooks so it is very important that you start with the correct list of customers.
Playbooks can be triggered off any traits, success metrics, elements, other playbooks, indicators, etc. There are many options for you to choose from to narrow down the audience list you want to specifically target (Below there is a User vs Account Playbook Example).
Playbook Triggers | Playbook Trigger Visuals |
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There are two types of logic when configuring more than one Playbook rules:
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Depending on the trigger rules you'll want to choose from and what you're trying to accomplish will depend on your selection. Below, User vs Account Playbook Example, we go over Users vs Accounts as an example.
These rules function somewhat differently depending on whether your Playbook targets accounts or users:
- Targeting Accounts - If your Playbook targets accounts AND you have User rules defined, then the account is a 'match' if any user at the account matches your User rules.
- Targeting Users - If your Playbook targets users, we'll apply any Account rules to the user's account and any User rules to the user itself.
Your selection here determines whether our system will apply the playbook's automated actions to either accounts or users or organizations (that match your playbook's rules). There's a big difference in functionality based on your selection!
For example, let's say you build a playbook with these conditions:
Let's also say your Playbook has an action to automatically send an email to whoever has the Playbook applied to them. Depending on whether your Playbook targets accounts or users, the functionality is quite different:
Above, notice how targeting accounts doesn't necessarily prevent users with NPS scores <= 8 from getting an email, but targeting users does. Why is that? When targeting accounts, you are telling Vitally that the output of the playbook is to impact/affect the account - not necessarily a specific user.
To elaborate, let's say that the action is to add the account to a segment (instead of sending an email). If your playbook's conditions are the same - there's 1 account rule and 1 user rule - Vitally needs to look at the account and go, "Should we add this account to this segment?". We answer that question by looking at the account's users and going, "Is there any user with a last NPS score greater than 8?". If so, the account gets added to the segment. That same process occurs when targeting accounts with a "Start a conversation" action.
Q: What should I do if I want to send emails based on user activity?
A: If you want to send specific users specific emails for exhibiting specific behaviors, then 99% of the time, you'll want the playbook to target users and not accounts. Since targeting users gives you complete control over the exact set of users that get your email, then that's likely the way to go.
Q: Why would I target accounts with an action to "Start a conversation"? Should I always just target users?
A: Definitely not. Since Vitally works with B2B companies almost exclusively, there's plenty of valid cases for saying "I need to email this company". For example, let's say you want to auto-engage accounts the moment all users at the account stop using your product for 7 days. However, you don't want to engage ALL those users, just the primary owner at the company that bought your product - perhaps you want to check in with that person to see if a team-wide onboarding session should be scheduled.
In that case, targeting the account is 100% the right way to go. To make sure that the primary account owner is the only one to get the email though, you'd select that option when configuring your email action:
Actions allow you to configure something that should happen once accounts/users match your rules on a set schedule.
For example, on the 1st day a Playbook is applied to an account, you can send an email to the account's owner. On the 3rd, you can create a task for the account's CSM. And on the 10th, you can send another email.
How To | How To Visual |
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Manage your Key Role assignments with intelligent algorithms! With the "Assign a Key Role" Playbook actions, you can auto-assign team members to accounts using 3 different algorithms:
- Assign to the selected team member who has the least-managed accounts
- Assign to the selected team member who has the least-managed revenue
- Assign to the selected team member who has not been assigned to an account for the longest amount of time (i.e. 'round robin')
Additionally, you can assign to a specific person!
Indicators are automated alerts that detect significant opportunity or risk states accounts may transition in to. They can be assigned to teammates, manually silenced (by marking the Indicator as addressed), and more.
Segments are organized subsets of each hierarchy, and you can use Playbooks to auto add and remove segments.
Starting a conversation with the right user at the right account is a critical component to Customer Success, and this action helps you do just that! You can send an email via Gmail or Outlook to auto-send it from the account's CSM, send personalized messages (using user, account, and CSM variables), and even schedule conversations to start on a delay, which gives your team time to review pending conversations and make any needed edits.
If you want to follow up to a previous conversation action you can select reply to a conversation! You'll, of course, need to have a conversation to reply to and once you've got that, you can then use the reply to a conversation action to send a follow-up email. To properly identify which conversation you want to reply to, reference the unique ID assigned to the conversation action.
Tasks are to-dos created for organizations/accounts and assigned to your teammates. With this action, you can ensure your team members complete specific activities for accounts exhibiting specific behaviors.
Use the data you are syncing to Vitally to update or complete a task automatically. E.g. When the Account enables our Slack integration, mark the 'Enable Slack' task as completed. Check out the video below for a full walkthrough!
Projects are sequences of tasks aimed to help a customer reach some stage or goal. With this playbook action, you can ensure that standard projects like onboarding, annual renewals, QBR processes, and more are automatically created for the right customers at the right times.
Docs provide transparency between you and your customer, the ability to create templates for consistency across team members, and the capability to share with customers to create a more collaborative relationship.
You can update any editable trait via a playbook! In this action, you have the ability to increment/decrement a number trait.
A popular use case for this can be used in conjunction with custom object playbooks to do some basic rollups, like tracking the number of Jira tickets created by a customer over the last 30 days.
Custom traits help you track data points about your customers directly in Vitally. With this action, you can set the value of a custom trait automatically for accounts that match your rules.
A popular use case for this action is to map your plan names to their monthly cost, automatically setting an MRR trait for accounts based on the plan they're subscribed to.
Vitally's Segment integration allows you to configure Vitally as a Segment destination, syncing the data you track in Segment (
groups, identifys, and tracks) into Vitally in real-time. However, you can also use Vitally as a Segment source, which allows you to push Vitally's unique customer insights back to Segment for use in your other tools! This doc explains that in more detail.This action allows you to send a Segment
track call to Segment-connected integrations as accounts or users reach certain points in the Playbook. For example, say you have a Playbook that welcomes new customers the first day they become a paying customer. With this action, you can send a track back to Segment to let other systems/data stores log a record of these new customers.An example track sent from a Playbook might look something like this:
analytics.track({
event: "New Vitally customer", // You get to define the event name per Playbook
groupId: "ACCOUNT_GROUP_ID", // We auto-set this for you using the account's Segment group ID
context: {
groupId: "ACCOUNT_GROUP_ID" // We auto-set this for you using the account's Segment group ID
},
properties: {
playbook: "New customer playbook" // This is the name of the playbook in Vitally
}
});
You can trigger actions in external systems with the Ping a webhook Playbook action. With this action, you can send a Playbook Identifier that identifies which playbook is sending the webhook, along with any user or account traits that you wish to send. You can also ping a webhook from note-triggered playbooks with details about the note.
To configure this action, make sure that you enter a valid webhook URL and select the proper HTTP method (PUT or POST). If your request will require any headers (i.e. authentication), simply enter those into the the Request Headers section.
Vitally's NPS for B2B SaaS (free) add-on is NPS rebuilt for Customer Success. When enabled, you can pair it with Playbooks to limit the users at accounts that should be shown a NPS survey.
For example, you could setup rules that filter accounts to just those on an annual deal that are renewing within 30 days. Add a 'Show NPS' action to your Playbook, and we'll only show the NPS survey to users at matching accounts!
Rules allow you to add delays or split logic to create branches.
- Split: Another word for this is branches! With branching, teams can create workflows with dedicated paths for addressing a range of different outcomes. The branching logic also means teams can reduce the number of their overall Playbooks. For example, instead of using multiple Playbooks to assign new customers to specific plan types, teams can utilize branching to filter new customers into their correct plan from a single Playbook.
- Wait: You can now choose between setting a rule for a waiting period as a defined number of days or until the account matches a specific set of rules. Users can set this rule for various situations, including automating emails, tracking account set up, or any other action your team may be automating for. When delaying automations until a specific condition is met, users can also define a maximum number of days to delay the next action. If a customer is stuck or doesn’t complete the expected action, your team can set a new path to best address the customer.
With our "split" rule, you can create branching conditions within a playbook. Follow these steps to add a branch:
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An "Otherwise" branch will always be created to capture any accounts or users that do not match the logic of the other branches.
To create playbooks that branch off of email engagement first add a branch to define the filters using Action Filters. For example, if you would like to create a new conversation if the previous message has not been replied to select that property and set it "Is False."
Once you have defined your branch logic, you can add what actions to trigger after the conversation. You can add the action Reply to a Conversation so the follow-up is tied to the initial conversation and a new thread is not created.
Once you've selected the action to Reply to a Conversation, you can select the conversation to tie it back to. There is an ID on each conversation that can easily identify the specific conversation (this comes in handy when you've got a large playbook with many conversations).
Once you've selected the conversation, you can then define the reply. Once done select Save and you're all set!
There are 2 options to delay an action in a playbook
Wait/Delays | Wait/Delays Visuals |
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This allows you to define rules that must be met in order for the matching audience to move forward in the playbook. You can also add in a max wait that will be a maximum amount of time to wait and when it has exceeded that wait time period, the object will move forward in the playbook. |  |
Define general details about your Playbook.
Select gear icon on the top righthand corner you can define general details about your Playbook:
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Creating a category is done when you're in a playbook so the workflow is slightly different than some of the other categories.
How To | How to Visual |
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Matching Audience allow you to preview the audience that currently matches the playbook criteria. This includes an audience that has already run through the playbook or will run through the playbook.
*Please note that CHURNED will not populate in this view but churned will go through the playbook. More on what actions are ignored when a user/account/org is churned in the FAQ
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How To | Visual |
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To view accounts with a specific Playbook active, you can enable the column for the desired Playbook and then sort by that column, add a filter on the column for the desired Playbook, or both! The column for each Playbook shows the date the Playbook was applied to the account as well as when it completed (e.i ran through the playbook to completion) If you click on the playbook column for a specific account, you can also see a history of the actions performed on the account by the Playbook. |  |
How To | How To Visual |
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When in a playbook, you can view any objects that are active or closed. By selecting an object you can see the history for that instance
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You can also go to an Org/Account/User 360 to see all the playbooks they have run through and select each one to view the history for that.
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Closing a Playbook has 2 impacts:
- All previously-applied actions are 'undone' (e.g. active Indicators are ended, pending messages are not sent, etc)
- No further actions will be applied to the account for that Playbook unless the account has the entire Playbook reapplied to them.
How To | How To Visual |
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If you'd like to 'force stop' a Playbook from executing any further actions on the account
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When you delete a playbook, here's what will happen:
- All previously-applied actions are 'undone' (e.g. active Indicators are ended, pending messages are not sent, etc)
- If the playbook added an account to a segment, the account will be removed from the segment.
- Tasks and custom traits will either be deleted/cleared or left alone, depending on the option that you select in the action configuration.
How To | How To VIsual |
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Deleting or cloning a Playbook is simple:
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Q: I applied an action retroactively but it didn't work?
A: When a playbook gets retroactively applied, it applies all new actions that have not yet been applied to matching accounts. It doesn’t rerun any actions that have already been applied to a matching account.
Q: Do churned account run through playbooks?
A: Yes, but not all actions are applied to churned accounts. Below is a list of actions that a playbook will ignore and actions that will work via a playbook:
Playbook actions applied: | Playbook actions ignored: |
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Q: I'm using the action filters to reply to a conversation earlier in the playbook but can not find the conversation I want to reply to, what's going on?
A: This is likely tied to the "strategy" in your conversation action. You want to be sure to have it set to "start a group conversation with users at the same account" and NOT "start one conversation per user". Once you switch that over to the appropriate strategy, you will now see the conversation under the action filters.