Action are specific tasks. A workflow may involve one or several actions related to single or multiple applications. For example, a reset password workflow may involve following action steps:
1. Verify user access
2. Validate user details
3. Reset password
4. Create support ticket to track.
Let’s go through steps involved in setting up an action
1) First, you’ll need to select an application. You can do this using the Select Application dropdown. In the Select Application dropdown, you can see a list of applications.
Choose one from the list.
2) Second, can select an action. For this, you can use the Action dropdown to select the appropriate action from the list of available actions for this application. The list of actions varies for each application.
3) Next, you’ll need to connect the application. For this you can use the Connect Account dropdown where you can select a preexisting connection if created already or add a new account.
Depending on the application you choose, the connection type varies.
There are 3 different types of connections: OAuth connection, Basic Auth connection and Costom Auth connection.
OAuth: There will be a Connect button to connect, clicking on it will take the user to the applications page where user will have to input the credentials to login as well as to grant permissions to Workativ Assistant to connect the application.
Basic Auth: Username and Password must be provided to connect with the selected application.
Custom Auth: Some applications like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Freshservice and Servicenow might require custom authentication like a Domain URL to connect with Workativ Assistant in addition to application’s login credentials. Only when an application’s custom authentication is successful will the application connect with Workativ Assistant (after you grant the required permissions).
Connect with your application by providing a name to the account and connect to the application by filling in the required details.
4) Next, you’ll have to map the input to the action under the Input field. Let’s say for instance you chose to perform an action using Twilio. You can either Send an OTP to a mobile number or you can verify the Sent OTP using Twilio.
For this, you’ll have to first specify the mobile number input. Before we do that, let’s see about the Context Variable pop up first.
Context Variables pop up
This pop up contains the output variables of all the previous actions you may have built thus far in Step – 2 as well as from Step 1.
Using this, you can map a previous action’s output as an input for the next action.
Only output variables of valid and available actions in a specific path will be available for use as inputs for an action in the same path.
Coming back to specifying the mobile number input, you can do it the following ways:
a. You can map the output of Step 1 as an input for a Step 2 action using the Context Variable popup.
b. You can hard-code a value directly in the input field.
Note: It is not recommended to add a hardcoded value if the value must be ‘collected’ from the user by the chatbot during a chat conversation.
5) The Action Summary field at the end of the Add Action pop up will be prefilled by default; you can change it as per your need.
6) After you’re done with specifying what you want the action to do on the Add Action pop up, click on the Save button. Now you have an action setup for sending an OTP to a user.
Note:
1) You can test the new action by clicking on the test button.
2) You can create as many actions as you want based on your use case.
Error Handling
In Step 2, enable Error Handling on the Action’s pop up if you need other actions to be executed irrespective of whether this action gets executed successfully or not. If Error Handling is disabled, the workflow stops if this action fails to execute.
To know more about Error Handling, check out this link.