1.2 - Understanding Automations: the difference between Local and Global

When working with babelforce, you can leverage a diverse array of Automations, ranging from creating tickets in help desk systems, retrieving customer data from external databases, to automatically removing customers from queues after reaching a specified wait time.

What are Automations?

Automations enable babelforce to interact with other systems, allowing to perform actions within those system and to retrieve information from them. But Automations can also run within the babelforce universe.

In short:

• Automations allow users to run Actions.
• Those actions may target internal babelforce systems
  • for instance, sending out a SMS or writing a specific debugging log.
• In other cases, these Actions are directed towards external systems.
  • External systems could be any Help Desk, such as Zendesk or Salesforce, where an action could involve creating a ticket for every call. 

In the forthcoming sections, we'll delve into specific examples and use cases. Initially, let's clarify the two primary types of Automations: Local and Global. Understanding the distinctions between them is crucial as selecting inappropriately can lead to overly complex or incorrect setups.

Differentiating Local and Global Automations:

• Local Automations are always embedded within an IVR or Voicebot
  • For instance: A call reaches your hotline; on the first Audio Module, you have a Local Automation that creates a ticket for that call in Zendesk and assigns it to the right end user.
• Global Automations are listening to specific events, such as "Incoming Call", "Recoding Finished", or "SMS Sent"
  • They are crucial for a number of scenarios outside of an IVR or Voicebot
  • As they apply globally, it can be tricky to configure them correctly as builders must ensure that they only trigger in the right time and place

This chapter only focusses on those automations that are embedded in an IVR and Voicebot, therefore on "Local Automations". 

Next, we'll guide you through creating a Local Automation by going through a first straightforward use case.