Automate Your Client Work With Accelo's Event-Based Triggers

Accelo’s custom triggers take the hassle out of managing tasks, time and client relationships and Accelo users love them. Their potential to automate client work and their flexibility to fit unique workflows make them one of our top-ranked features.

Our intelligent triggers run in the background - firing off emails, tasks, status changes and more — so that you can focus on the work that matters. Moreover, triggers can be defined across nearly all your workflows (projects, tickets, retainers, sales, companies and contacts) and most importantly, if you have various types of tickets in Accelo, each type can have a different trigger event associated with it.  

One of Accelo's other most popular features is our automatic email tracking. When a client sends you or your colleagues an email, Accelo captures and tracks the conversation automatically — improving visibility across your team.

READ NEXT: When Trigger Automations Drive Sales: Accelo Success Stories

We combine these two powerful features with our event-based triggers.

This evolution from previous platform triggers means actions like "when a client sends an email reply to a ‘Resolved’ ticket containing the word 'Urgent,’ send a notification to the account manager and the ticket assignee and reopen the ticket" are now possible.

Because these event-based triggers work in tandem with the activities happening across the platform, we’re effectively doubling the power of the triggers module by tapping into the emails, work logs, meetings and calls that are logged every day.

Setting Up Trigger Events — Real-Time Detection of Emails and Activities

A custom trigger event is designed to detect when a specific kind of activity has occurred — such as an email, work log, call or meeting — and in response, perform one or more defined actions. 

These event-based triggers include a few important features:

1. Event Preferences

To provide flexibility with your trigger configuration, there are several event preferences you can define for the activity to comply with:

• Activity Created By: Options to select Any, Contact or Staff. This selection defines if a trigger should care about activities generated by a client contact, internal users or both.
• Activity Type: This field allows you to specify if certain types of activities (i.e. emails and meetings, but not calls) should have the trigger fire.
• Subject: This field can define which keywords or phrases a trigger should act on in the subject line, like “Priority,” “Urgent” or “Escalate.” You can also define a trigger event around emails that don’t contain a specific word or phrase.
• Body: Much like the subject field, this field allows you to define specific keywords or phrases in the email body that tell the trigger to fire.
• Time Logged: This field allows you to define how much time has been logged against the activity. This can help enforce a minimum of 30 minutes on all project work logs or warn a project manager when someone logs more than eight hours at a time.

2. Trigger Event Operation Times

Since you may not want Accelo to bother you or your team outside of working hours, the event triggers include preferences to control which days of the week and hours in a day a trigger can run.

In these settings, you can also set whether the trigger can repeat. The first option should be selected if you only want a trigger to fire once for each ticket, regardless of how many more valid activities are detected on that same ticket. 

However, if you need the trigger to keep firing for every valid activity on the same ticket then you’ll choose this second option:

If you select to have the trigger run more than once, consider using a delay to ensure you don’t create unnecessary notifications. This can happen if a client sends follow-up emails in rapid succession.

TIP: To avoid multiple alerts about the same issue, we recommend setting a four-hour delay which will result in any matching activity events in a short span of time being ignored by the trigger.

Important Feature: Loop Detection

It is possible to create a Trigger > Action > Trigger > Action loop if your action includes creating a generic activity. To prevent ongoing trigger loops, we will disable the trigger after it fires 10 times in five minutes. After disabling, we will send a message to the last person who modified the trigger and connect you with our Support team to assist, if necessary.

3. Work Rules

Trigger event rules allow you to further define when your trigger should fire. Depending on the product area where you are creating a trigger, you can select specific categories, fields or conditions for when a trigger should fire.

These additional trigger rules ensure you can have an trigger event set up to check for emails from a client contact at a very specific point in the interaction. For example, a rule may state that the trigger should only apply if the client ticket is in the “Waiting for Client” status.

NOTE: If you relocate an activity from one ticket to another, this can cause the event trigger to fire — provided that both the activity conditions and ticket rules are satisfied.

Custom triggers are a premium feature in all Accelo products. If you'd like to activate triggers in your current Accelo account, or if you have any other questions about custom triggers, please reach out to our Support team at [email protected] or connect with your Customer Success Manager to learn more.