Setting up Automations in babelforce to achieve your integration goals

In this section, we will give you some basic explanations how to integrate babelforce with your CRM, helpdesk or any other notification or reporting tool. We'll try to keep this article pretty general so that you can adopt these instructions to your own specific setting and integration.

This article will be separated into three main sections:

1. General explanation of Automations and how they work in babelforce
2. Integrations with a CRM
3. Integrations with a helpdesk

Let's start with the general explanation:

1. General explanation of Automations and how they work in babelforce

The first thing to make our integration work is to set up Automations in the babelforce manager app which are triggered by certain predefined Events to carry out a specific Actions. Here are some simple examples:

Imagine, we want to open a ticket whenever a call comes in. That is our Automation. The predefined Event is "call comes in" or let's phrase it "call created". The Action we want to carry out is "open a ticket". It's as simple as that. Now imagine, you only want to open tickets on a Sunday. Then you have to set a Trigger which only fires on Sundays. If you want to open a ticket whenever a call is created, you would want to set the Trigger "always". If you want to learn more on how to build triggers, please read this helpcenter article. We also created an article which goes into further details describing global and local Automations. Have a look!

babelforce implemented some predefined Events into the app interface. Let's go through them, quickly, they are rather self-explanatory:

The first section deals with predefined "Agent" Events. You could for example carry out certain Actions whenever an agent is created or his availability (presence) status has changed. Then there are the predefined Events related to a call. Here we can decide between inbound and outbound calls but also influence the different stages of a call, etc. Additionally there are Actions connected to Recordings, SMS and transactions available.

Now that we covered the different predefined Events, let's have a look at the available Actions. As the screenshot shows, the first bunch of Actions deals with

• sending emails and sms or creating transactions if you want to send certain information via these channels
• leaving the call queue or hangup a call (if the max wait time has been reached for instance)
• creating a custom callback by sending call data via an HTTP callback
• sending a certain log message at some point during the call activity
• setting variables to have certain information stored in a ticket at a certain point during the call activity
• defining Actions for all other possible reporting and notification tools like pushover or geckoboard, as well as for each of the helpdesks and CRMs.

Now, let's have a closer look at the CRMs and helpdesks. As you might have read in our general introduction, we have to differentiate between the integrations of a helpdesk and those of a CRM. So let's start with the CRMs.

2. Integrations with a CRM

The main goal of using integrations with CRMs is to keep track of your different leads and manage your marketing campaigns. Hence, the main focus lies on outbound calls and dealing with leads. Therefore, we adopted the integration capabilities of our CRMs so that they will fit to these needs.

In this article we'll take ZohoCRM as our example. However, note that all other CRMs are working similarly. Here you see an overview of the possible actions  with our ZohoCRM integration.

Firstly, we have to select the action "Lookup end-user" in the babelforce section of the drop down menu:

With this action we can set up an Automation which checks if a contact exists in your CRM, every time a call is created (we would have to set "call created" as the predefined Event). If the contact exists in your CRM already, the ticket could be assigned to that contact by creating another Automation with the Action "Associate contact with call". For a detailed description of these Automations, please click here.

Although the tickets are created in Zoho in this example, the procedure works similarly for other CRMs.

If the contact does not already exist in your CRM, the number of the end-user is assigned to the newly opened ticket. However, the integration with ZohoCRM also offers the possibility to have a new lead created in this case. We can have it be created by means of another Automation with the Action "create lead". Instead of associating a contact with the call, we can also associate a lead with a call. Similarly, we can have a call assigned to a certain agent.

Applying this logic, we could now schedule an outbound call for a callback if no agent is available when a call comes in or a customer didn't pick up when an agent tried to reach out. Also, we could assign tags and notes to a call.

Ensure that you always apply the correct Triggers. For example, we only want to schedule an outbound call if the call is inbound but no agent is available. So we would have to define these two conditions in a Trigger and add it to the Automation. This article describes how to create and test Triggers.

Now that we covered the CRM basics, let's look at one specific case which might become useful to you when working with leads.

The Outbound Dialer, If you want to learn more about what a dialer is and the different types available, check out this article in our help center.

The outbound dialer is a little bit more tricky to set up. Firstly, you have to set up the campaigns you want to carry out and the lists of contacts you want to contact. Click here to learn, how to do this. Once you set this all up, you can create the Automation to use it. Therefore, we build a Trigger which fires if the call source is the dialer (which is that point in time when the dialer successfully connected to a customer and forwarded the call to an agent).

Now, lets look at the 3rd section.

3. Integrations with a helpdesk

When you integrate babelforce with a helpdesk, your objectives might differ slightly to those of a CRM. Your focus might be on answering customer requests and questions as efficiently as possible. Instead of focusing on outbound telephony, you are giving higher priority to your inbound calls. So let's have a look at some typical Actions you might want to carry out:

You will notice that the set up for our helpdesk integrations is a bit broader than that of a CRM.  As you see in the following screenshot, Freshdesk and Zendesk for example have only four actions displayed.

That means that we have to specify these Actions further by adding comments or tags, or personalized Triggers in the section "Update ticket":

However, the functionality is the same as with CRMs. Just make sure to define the point where you want your Action to be carried out by a predefined Event.

We could then, for example, open a ticket whenever a call is created and update this ticket with a finish-tag when the call is finished, etc., etc. The possibilities are endless (well, nearly ;-)).

Great, so now you have an overview of what you can do to make the best out of your integration with babelforce. Feel free to play around a bit to personalize your own babelforce experience.