Automations - Overview

For all those times when you have thought, "I will have to write a few more lines of code" every time you need to write a condition or a workflow trigger in your application, we heard you.

Introducing Fyno's Automation builder!

This feature has the flexibility to plug in anywhere and logically help you connect your application workflows, catering to your entire notification piece, without coding!

What is an Automation?

Automation in Fyno is a notifications orchestration service that allows anyone to easily design intelligent notification workflows without coding.

Automation can be used to

• Deliver notifications based on notification events created from data, segmentation and cohorting sources like Segment, MongoDB, Mixpanel etc.
• Deliver notifications based on a payment gateway response like Razorpay.
• Delay / Schedule the delivery of notifications, based on time triggers.

Understanding Automations

The best way to explain the full scope and capability of Automations is with an example. So, let’s dive right in.

Company ABC handles payments on its website via an external payment gateway.

The requirement is

• To send a notification to the customer whenever an online payment succeeds or fails.
• If a payment fails, the automation should handle the failure scenario differently depending on the type of customer.

Fyno’s automation makes it simple to operate this end-to-end process.

While Fyno’s notification events will handle the delivery of notifications, the true power of automations can be harnessed by calling external APIs as part of the automation and creating actions based on the response.

For this example, let’s assume that company ABC has two API endpoints -

1. /customers - a GET endpoint that returns the type of customer.
2. /orders/{{customer_id}} - a PUT endpoint that can update the customer’s order details
   Here is how the end-to-end process would work:
   

1. Company ABC creates the automation in Fyno.
2. ABC then adds the automation URL as a webhook for successful and failed payments on the payment gateway site
3. Customer 1 makes a successful purchase on ABC’s website. The automation fires, and the customer receives an SMS and email confirming the successful purchase.
4. Customer 2 cannot make a successful online payment due to an issue with the bank. The automation fires, and due to the failed payment, it knows to trigger the automation that calls the /customers endpoint to get more details about the customer.
5. Luckily, Customer 2 is found to be a Power User (best user cohort in terms of monetisation) based on the result of the API call to /customers.
6. As a result, Customer 2’s order is confirmed (despite the failed payment), and the automation converts the order type to COD by making an API call to /orders/{{customer_id}}. (How does the automation do this??? how was this informed to the automation)
7. If this API call is successful, the automation sends an order confirmation to the customer via the preferred channel.

Importance and usage of Automations

Now that you have an understanding of how Automations broadly work, it's easy to understand the implications of such a feature.

What would have otherwise required more than a few lines of code to configure, is being addressed with Fyno's Automation feature, allowing you to add triggers, provide conditions and decide outcomes, all with a visual understanding of how the entire flow will work.

Automations have helped many of our clients solve a major and important piece of the workflow - Trigger-based action that DRIVES the workflow.

Automation is being used for:

1. Condition-based logical reasoning
2. Creation of flows outside your code
3. Triggering of alarms for internal triggers set on the application.