Glossary term
Workflow Automation
Workflow automation means writing a rule once, in the form 'when this happens, if that is true, do this', and letting the system apply it every time without anyone having to remember it.
What is workflow automation?
Workflow automation turns the repetitive steps of selling and serving customers into rules the system carries out on its own. Every rule has a trigger that starts it, such as a deal being created, a message arriving or a quote being accepted; conditions that decide when it applies, such as deal value or lead source; and actions that run in order, such as assigning an owner, creating a task or sending a message, sometimes with waits and branches in between. The payoff is not only minutes saved. It is the certainty that the right step happens every time, for every customer, however busy the day or whoever owns the account. It differs from a sales sequence, where one contact is enrolled in a series of touches; a workflow reacts to events across the whole system.
| Part | Role | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | The event that starts a run | Web form submitted |
| Filter or condition | Decides whether the run continues, and on which branch | Lead source is 'Google Ads' |
| Action | What the system does | Assign the deal owner |
| Wait | Delays the next step | Wait one day |
| Branch | Two paths depending on the result | If the stage has not changed, alert the manager; otherwise stop |
Example: routing and following up web inquiries
Illustrative example: a corporate training provider receives inquiries through a website form and finds that some sit untouched for days. It builds one workflow:
- Trigger: web form submitted.
- AI classification: label the inquiry as 'in-house training', 'public course' or 'other' and save the label to a field.
- Branch: in-house requests go to the corporate team lead as deal owner; the rest go to the course coordinator.
- Action: create a call task for the new owner, due today.
- Wait: one day.
- Condition: if the deal is still in its first stage, send an in-app notification to the sales manager.
The inquiry now reaches the right person within seconds, and a stalled one becomes a signal to someone who can act on it.
In Naffes CRM
Workflows in Naffes CRM has a visual canvas builder. You pick a trigger, add, reorder and configure steps, save, and run a test, a dry-run simulation with no real side effects, before activating. The page shows active, paused and draft counts, runs in the last 30 days, the success rate, and each workflow's run history with step-by-step results.
| Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Triggers | 27 built in, covering deals, contacts, companies, WhatsApp and SMS messages, web forms, quotes, invoices, payments and bot-to-human handoff |
| Steps | 20 types, including moving a deal, assigning its owner, creating a task, sending an email, a WhatsApp message, an approved template or an SMS, an HTTP request and in-app notifications |
| Conditions | 13 operators, plus changed, changed from and changed to on update triggers, and ordered if/else branches |
| AI | An AI summary step that can write into a field, and an AI classification step that picks a label from your list with a confidence score |
| Reliability | Failed action steps retried up to 3 times with growing delays; send pacing by default at 20 WhatsApp messages, 20 SMS and 60 emails per minute, with nothing dropped |
| Plans | Workflows need Starter or above; default allowance is 5 on Starter, 50 on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise (none on Free) |
Not in the builder yet: the builder has no for-each loop step, no library of ready-made workflow templates, and no 'deal stuck' or 'email received' trigger. Scheduled (cron) runs exist, but a schedule can only be created through the API; there is no screen for it.
Principles for automation that does not backfire
- Automate a process the team already runs by hand in fixed steps; never automate one nobody has agreed on.
- Run the test before every activation and read each step's result, not only the final one.
- Watch for loops: a workflow that updates a field while listening for updates to the same record can set itself off again.
- Review success rate and run history weekly, and give every workflow a named owner.
- When an outside system must learn about an event immediately, use an HTTP request step or a webhook.
Questions
Questions 2
How is a workflow different from a chatbot?
A chatbot talks to the customer inside a WhatsApp conversation and collects answers. A workflow runs in the background on CRM records, reacting to events and carrying out actions such as assignment, tasks and messages. They work together: the bot handing a chat to a human is itself a trigger that can start a workflow.
Could automation send so many messages that our number gets banned?
Naffes guards against that by pacing sends per workspace; when a workflow hits the limit it pauses and resumes later on the same step. Following WhatsApp's policies and holding customer opt-in remain the business's responsibility.