Month: October 2013

Using Rules To Automate Appointment Reminders

Here’s an innovative use of rules that was recently launched by one of our customers: Automatically texting reminders to the broker and buyer, or the broker and seller, just before an appointment.

This customer happens to be in the real-estate industry, but this idea can be used in other industries as well.

Based on a BizConnector feature that fires a rule a certain number of minutes before the date/time value in a specified field, the customer defined the rule to fire 90 minutes before the appointment.

This uses a ‘pseudo field’ ‘Minutes To Appointment Date/Time’, which is not found in the original object definition, but is derived from the fact that Appointment Date/Time is a datetime field.

The rule action was then set as:


The template ‘Text Notify New Appt Set for Agent’ – sent to the Real Estate Agent – has the contents:

‘You have a new {!Lead_AppointmentType} appointment on {!Lead_AppointmentDateTime}. Please contact {!Lead_FullName} ({!Lead_MobilePhone}) to confirm’

where {!Lead_AppointmentType} can be ‘seller’ or ‘buyer’ when it is actually sent out.

When sent, the message would be something like ‘You have a new buyer appointment on October 23, 2:30pm. Please contact John Smith (917-555-1212) to confirm’.

How does this work? This rule, based on ‘Leads’, is watching the Leads database, and fires when a new record is added (or a record is updated) which matches the rule condition. As soon as it fires, it sends out the SMS message.

Of course, emails can be used instead of, or together with SMS. And you can use ‘Days To’ instead of ‘Minutes To’ for the lead time.

That’s all there is to it!

For more information about this, or to attend an online demo, please contact us.

 

Using Rules To Automate Contract Expiration Notices

One popular need for BizConnector users is to automate the production of contract expiration notices.

This is a fairly straightforward use case, but one that is not easily handled by other tools. BizConnector comes to the rescue with two ‘pseudo fields’:

  • Minutes To
  • Days To

that make this easy to implement. These fields are not to be found in the original object definitions, but are derived from date or datetime fields.

For example:
Say you have an Opportunity date field ‘Contract Expiration’. [This is an appropriate field for an Opportunity record].

The objective is to send one or more emails to your customer contact, starting 60 days before the contract is due to expire. To do this, you would create a rule expressly for this purpose. Let’s call the rule ‘Contract Expiration Notices’.

In the rule editor, after naming the rule, you would create the rule condition:


The second (and last) step is to set up the email sequence:

Note that the delay ‘None’ means that Expiration Notice #1 will be sent when the rule fires – 60 days before the expiration date, and Expiration Notice #2 will be sent 30 days later – 30 days before the expiration date.

Note also that the above rule will fire based on information in the Opportunity record, but send emails to the Contact(s) related to that Opportunity. This is a feature of BizConnector, which is deeply integrated with Salesforce and knows the Salesforce model.

That’s all there is to it!

For more information about this, or to attend an online demo, please contact us.