Flowset Release April 2024

We are pleased to announce the following changes included in the release of our Flowset product dated 4 April 2024

Summary of Release

This release includes improvements to several Standard and Advanced Model features to provide a richer experience for admins configuring Flowset and agents using Flowset.

Improved rendering of task field placeholders in comments

When defining comments as part of a workflow definition, the values of any relevant task fields can be included in the comment by inserting a placeholder for the task field.  When the workflow is running, and the comment is added to the ticket, these placeholders are replaced with the value of the corresponding task field. 

When placeholders are inserted into a comment definition, they are now rendered to show the name of the task field so that it is clear where placeholders are being used and which task field the placeholder is for.

See Transition Comments for details.

Enable the use of tables and images in comments and notes

The Flowset comment editor has been enhanced to allow tables and images to be included in the comment definition.  These additions allow richer formatting of information to be used in a comment to improve the clarity of the comment and, hence, the workflow being performed on the ticket.

See Transition Comments for details.

When defining Workflow and Activity Notes, you can now include embedded images to improve their presentation and help the agent better understand what they need to do to proceed.

Rich guidance notes in tasks

Flowset has supported the ability to add guidance messages to Standard Model activity task fields and Advanced model task fields.  A guidance message consists of a short text message and an option link to an external website.  Rich guidance notes are a new feature of Advanced models and allow fully formatted guidance nodes to be defined, which can include formatted text, tables, links, embedded images and task field placeholders.

Rich guidance notes are displayed by the workflow assistant in a larger scrollable area to allow more sophisticated guidance to the agent where necessary.

See Activity Task Modeling (Advanced) for details.

Restrict ticket field options in task fields

Flowset Advanced Models allow activities to be broken down into tasks and these tasks can be arranged to flow and branch based on the information supplied by the agent.  Flowset now allows the drop down option values available for a Zendesk ticket based task fields to be restricted to a subset of all the values defined for the Zendesk drop down field.  This helps to ensure that the agent is only able to choose from a validated set of option values.

For example, if a ticket field representing the countries we operate in has the available option 'France', 'England', 'Germany', 'USA' and 'Canada' and we have previously ascertained that the customer is based in Europe, then we may want to restrict the available options to 'France', 'England' and 'Germany'.

See Activity Task Modeling (Advanced) for details.

Persist task data beyond the current activity

Task data may be collected as part of enacting an activity in a workflow assigned to a ticket.  Typically, this task data is used to ensure that all required information has been gathered;  based on the information supplied, this guides the workflow to transition to the next activity.  When the current activity is complete, this task data can be written to the ticket as part of a comment, but once the workflow transitions to the next activity, this task data is deleted.

A configuration option is now provided which tells Flowset to remember all task data provided in all activities performed on a ticket.  This complete record of all task data provided throughout the whole ticket workflow can be included in a ticket comment.  This can provide

• A summary of all the latest task data captured when running the workflow on the ticket.
• A complete audit of all task data captured as the ticket is processed using the workflow.

See Workflow Options for details.

Improved handling of character based data input

When editing character based task fields you are now given the options to commit the changes or to discard them and revert back to the previous value. 

You can commit the changes by

• Clicking the new tick button
• Pressing the Enter Key (except when editing Text Area fields)
• Pressing the Tab Key
• Clicking the mouse anywhere outside of the task field

You can discard the changes by

• Clicking the new cross button
• Pressing the Escape Key

Character based fields are fields of type

• Text
• Text Area (multiline)
• Regular Expression
• Decimal
• Integer
• Currency

See Workflow Current Activity (Advanced Model) when using advanced models.

See Workflow Current Activity (Standard Model) when using standard models.

Better support for decimal and currency task fields

When entering data into decimal or currency fields using the workflow assistant, validation checks were performed to ensure that the value was a correct decimal value.  The validation would allow only the dot (.) character as the separator between units and decimals.  This has been enhanced to allow the use of either dots (.) or commas (,) as the separator.