What is Workflows?

Workflows give you deterministic control over how Gladly behaves during a Conversation. Where Guides use AI to interpret instructions and respond flexibly to what a Customer says, Workflows follow a fixed sequence of steps, the same way, every time, regardless of how the conversation unfolds.

Use Workflows when consistency matters more than flexibility: sending a required disclosure, collecting specific information before a handoff, routing customers based on Channel or intent, or filtering out contacts you don't want Gladly to engage with.

How Workflows fit with Guides

Guides and Workflows are complementary. Guides handle the open-ended, conversational work: answering questions, taking action, deciding when to escalate. Workflows handle the parts of a conversation where steps need to happen in a specific order and the outcome needs to be guaranteed.

Workflows connect to a Gladly Agent through Workflow Triggers. Two triggers are available:

Runs a workflow before the first message is processed
Runs a workflow before a handoff to a team member.

In both cases, the workflow completes its steps first, then control passes back to the Agent or the human team member.

Use the visual below to understand how Workflows and Guides are separate, but can work together:

Comparison of workflows and guides illustrating their roles in customer interactions.

What you can do with Workflows

Workflows are built from five step types that can be combined in any order:

Say — Send a message to the customer. Can be a fixed, word-for-word message or an AI-generated response based on instructions you provide.
Ask — Collect information from the customer through a back-and-forth conversation. Gladly keeps asking follow-up questions until all required fields are captured.
If — Branch the workflow based on a condition. Conditions can be expression-based (checking the value of a variable or conversation attribute) or evaluated by AI (for example, "Is the customer upset?").
Use — Run an external action, such as looking up data, applying a topic, or checking business hours.
Stop — End the workflow. When stopping, you choose what happens next: hand off to a team member, route to a specific Gladly Agent or Guide, close the conversation, or close with a scheduled follow-up.

Common use cases

Workflows are well-suited to any situation that needs to run the same way every time. Here are a few examples of how teams use them:

Greeting and disclosure messages
Send a required first message before your Gladly Agent responds, such as an SMS opt-out notice or a disclosure that the customer is speaking with an AI.
Spam and email filtering
Identify emails from known senders, newsletters, or automated notifications and close them automatically without routing to your team.
Collect info before a handoff
Before transferring a customer to a team member, gather their name, issue description, email address, or order number so your team has the context they need.
Route customers to the right Guide
Use the customer's Channel, Entry Point, or their response to an opening question to send them to the correct Guide automatically.
Buyer and seller routing
For marketplace businesses, ask customers to identify themselves and route each to a completely different experience based on their response.
After-hours handling
Check whether your team is available and, if not, notify the customer and close the session or schedule a follow-up for when you reopen.
Block unwanted handoffs
Prevent a handoff from completing under certain conditions, such as when a Contact comes in outside of business hours or from a channel you don't staff.
Apply topics automatically
Tag conversations with the right topic based on what a customer says or does before a Gladly Agent or team member takes over.

Overview of workflows with descriptions, versions, and update timestamps for Gladly platform.

How Workflows are organized

Workflows exist independently of any individual Gladly Agent. A single Workflow can be connected to multiple Agents, which means you can build a Workflow once and reuse it wherever it's needed. You manage all Workflows from the Workflows page in the Gladly AI admin.

Creating a workflow on its own does nothing. For a workflow to run, it needs to be connected to a trigger within a Gladly Agent. To do that, you configure it from the Workflow Triggers tab within that Agent. See Workflow Triggers for instructions.