Creating automated workflows with 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 accounts or users 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.
A simple playbook example would be one that is auto-applied to customers 10 days before their renewal. On the 1st day the playbook is applied, you could auto-send the renewing customer's owner an email letting them now they are renewing soon. On the 3rd day (i.e. 7 days before renewal), you could create a task for the customer's CSM to review their product usage in Vitally.
Of course, you can build way more advanced playbooks than that 😉
To create a Playbook, navigate to Playbooks in the Account/User Management section of your account settings (or get there via Quick Jump or the Global Create Button).
You can create Playbooks in 4 steps
- Overview - Define basic details about your Playbook
- Rules - Define rules to auto apply your Playbook
- Actions - Define actions to auto apply to matched accounts/users on a set schedule
- Review - Review your Playbook before setting it live
We are not constantly evaluating playbook filters - we do it periodically*. Playbooks run roughly every hour.
- 1.Determine what you're trying to trigger,
- 1.Organizations (if you have this enabled)
- 2.Accounts
- 3.Users
- 4.Or Custom Objects (for each Custom Object, they will be listed out. Ex: Opportunity, Jira Issue from above screenshot)
In trying to determine what level of playbook keep in mind:
- Organization: will be applied based on organization level filters
- Account: will be applied based on account level filters
- Users: will be applied based on user level filters
- Custom Objects: will be applied based on custom objects traits
Playbooks are auto-applied to accounts/users only when they meet certain conditions. You'll define those conditions within Rules.
Choose the limit of how many times the Accounts/Users/Organizations can enroll into the playbook over a specific timeframe.
Accounts/Users/Organizations can still only be enrolled into the playbook once while matching the rules. For Custom Objects in playbook frequency, it will be once per Custom Object not per Account.
Note that there are 2 types of rules: Account rules & user rules. 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.
There are two types of logic when configuring more than one Playbook rules:
- AND Logic: To identify Accounts or Users that meet one rule/group of rules AND another rule/group of rules.
- OR Logic: To identify Accounts or Users that meet one rule/group of rules OR another rule/group of rules.
Filter Groups allow you to use and/or logic with any groups of multiple filters:
Matching Audience allow you to preview the accounts or user that match the playbook criteria:
By clicking the blue button you can add actions and rules.
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.
Rules allow you to create add delays or split logic to your playbook:
- Split: create branched logic within your playbook.
- Wait: create a delay before moving to the next step of the playbook.
With our "split" rule you can create branching conditions within a playbook. Follow these steps to add a branch:
- Select the "Split" rule
- Click to add a branch
- Name the branch (optional)
- Define the conditions of the branch
- Click to add additional branches as needed
An "Otherwise" branch will always be created to capture any accounts or users that do not match the logic of the other branches.
Once your conditions have been defined click save and your branch will now display:
To create playbooks that branch off of email engagement first add a branch to define the filters. In addition to "Account" and "User" filters there is now an "Action" filter.
Once you have selected the action you will define what conditions to trigger the conversation or task. 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."
This will enable you to select new playbook action to "reply" to the original conversation.
From there you can define the new conversation.
Once your have defined the conversation simply save and a new "reply" action will be added to the playbook. All the same logic would be used to create a "Task" based on the status of a previous task in the playbook.
There are 2 options to delay an action in a playbook
- Wait for a number of days
- Wait until the Organization/Account/User matches specific rules
Wait for a number of days will allow you to wait a specific number of days until the playbooks next steps are applied to the Account/User/Organization
- Wait for a number of days
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Wait until Organization/Account/User matches specific rules will allow you to define rules that must be met in order for an enrolled user 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 Organization/Account/User will move forward in the playbook.
- Wait until the account matches specific rules
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By clicking the gear icon in the top righthand corner you can define general details about your Playbook:
- Name - Give your Playbook a name so you/your team can easily identify it later.
- Category - Optional, but helps keep your Playbooks organized.
- Description - Want to give your team some context and direction when the Playbook is applied? Then enter a note here and add account/user variables via the bottom right icon in the toolbar. We will 'compile' your note here with the matching account/user when displaying it throughout Vitally!
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 both the date the Playbook was applied to the account as well as the percentage progress through the schedule of actions.
If you click on the percentage progress, you can also see a history of the actions performed on the account by the Playbook. If the creator of the Playbook added a description, you'll also see that as well.
Each account dashboard displays all active and past applied Playbooks to the account, with active Playbooks displayed first.
Click on a specific Playbook to see a history of the Playbook's applied actions to the account.
If you'd like to 'force stop' a Playbook from executing any further actions on the account, click the Stop playbook link displayed below the progress timeline.
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.
When closing the Playbook, you can optionally leave a note detailing why you are doing so. This note is visible to your entire team.
Deleting a Playbook is simple - just click the trash icon from the Playbooks view.
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.
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.
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