Why are we building a native workflow engine in DevRev, when Zapier already exists
Imagine you are in a quarterly meeting. Overall theme boils down to, “how we grow faster?”. Seems relatable right?
Every other quarterly KPI goals , including ours, comes down to more efficiency.
Reduce Customer churn, Increase SLA compliance, Increase CSAT, Deflect L1 queries, decrease ticket resolution time, and a hundred other variations of these metrics, are the things you need to do to become a better team. To achieve this you need more work done, reliably and with consistency, and that’s where automations help without increasing headcount.
Let’s say, when you come out of that meeting , you decided that “Let’s Increase SLA Compliance”. You soon realize that just simple automations do not work enough.
Fundamentally, SLA compliance increases when there is good collaboration between support and engineering teams and robust escalation automations.
When you start brainstorming with the team around the nitty gritty details of process changes we need to do to increase SLA compliance, you find out the following:-
- You realize that we need to automate sending notification to the right engineering when a ticket stage goes to certain stage. The engineering team maybe sitting in another system, like Jira.
- You soon realize that there should be good delays between escalation nudges to make sure we are not flooding everyone with notification at once.
- You also want some special treatment to some special customers, and that data is yet in another internal system.
- You realize that it would be really useful, if the automation could create some linked engineering issues when ticket is at a certain stage.
The brainstorming can continue for long, and similar hundreds of process changes you can come up.
What do you need to do great stuff? The rubber hits the road.
Now the question is , how will you implement these automations to achieve what we discussed above?
- You need action nodes in your workflow which connects to external systems.
- You need to have branching parallel paths in your workflow.
- You need the ability to have delays in your workflows.
- You need the ability to have your own custom actions.
- You need the ability to reliably monitor your workflows (ofcourse!)
- The list continues…
Unfortunately, your support tool never thought you needed these. The automation features inside the support tools are really limited.
They are just giving the “hardware”, i.e the system of record. The “software” , system of action, now you have to figure it out on its own. You end up outsourcing your “software” to workflow tools like Zapier, Workato etc. They are powerful in their own right, but do not understand your data. You can perhaps implement all the processes you imagined there but you get all the quirks and frustrations of a system where the software and the hardware are not talking with each other.
Once you outsource to a tool or service what you get is:
- Years or months of implementation delays
- Engineering bottlenecks
- Tech stack explosion
- High price for you system of record, to “just work”
- Conflicting workflows
- No single view of all your process automation initiatives
So what do you need?
Ever wondered why Apple products have great experiences? Because the hardware and the software really marries together with precision. The “software” is not outsourced. Similar is with CRM systems. Outsourcing your “software”, i.e. the workflows, is a big mistake.
You don’t want a system of record that is just the hardware.
You want a system of action and intelligence together, the software and the hardware shipped in one unison to you.
Hence, we decided to create a robust, infinitely customizable workflow engine with AI nodes, built into DevRev. You don’t need to outsource your most crucial lifelines to a Zapier or some other service. What you get with this are endless personalized automations tailored to your need:
- Building the workflow engine natively, gives us a lot of leverage, for example our native AI nodes, built on your data, helping you easily delegate your brittle if/else conditions.
- DevRev systems avoids you from building bad workflows during design time, because we do data type matching of your variables, don’t even let you select bad variables, which may lead to broken workflows.
- DevRev makes it extremely easy for you to trust whether your workflows are running or not. Whether you are technical or not, you can easily understand and monitor your workflows when needed and fix it.
- Extremely easy to create another action node, if you need. Bring your own action nodes as per your business context and needs.
- Maintain your workflows with confidence. You get better in your organizing your workflows and also have reusable workflows.
