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:

1. Runs a workflow before the first message is processed.

2. 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:

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.

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.

Start with a template

The fastest way to get started with Workflows is to use one of the built-in templates available in the workflow editor. Templates are pre-built starting points for the most common workflow use cases. When you create a new workflow, the editor opens to the template selector automatically, choose a template to start from a pre-built structure you can customize, or select Blank to build from scratch.

Available templates

• First-message disclosure — sends a required disclosure message that varies by channel

• Collect info before handoff — gathers customer details before transferring to a team member

• Spam routing rules — automatically sorts inbound emails by content and routes them accordingly

• Route to guide — uses AI to classify the conversation and send it to the right Guide

• Block after-hours handoff — prevents handoffs when agents are offline

• User address verification — verifies a customer's email or phone number via a one-time code, remembering successful verifications for the session

Workflows billing principles

Workflows follow the same billing model as the rest of Gladly AI: a Session bills when Gladly delivers a message to the Customer and reaches a billable outcome (Assist or Resolve). It does not bill when Gladly does work in the background that the customer never sees.

What bills and what doesn't:

Spam filtering

A spam Workflow must end with a Stop → Close Session step to guarantee the Session is not billable. This prevents any further Workflow or Guide from running. If a spam Workflow sends even a single message before closing, that Session is billable.

OTP in Workflows

If your Workflow includes an OTP (One Time Password) step, additional Twilio costs may apply for SMS verification. The User address verification template handles the full OTP flow out-of-the-box. Any Session that includes an OTP step is billed at your standard Gladly AI rate – as an Assist or Resolve – based on the Session outcome. This is the same billing logic that applies to all Gladly AI Sessions.

Twilio costs (SMS OTP only)

When you use Gladly's built-in SMS OTP – powered by Twilio Verify – a small per-verification fee appears on your existing Twilio bill. Gladly does not mark up these costs.

These charges apply per successful verification. If a Customer requests a new code, each SMS sent incurs the per-message fee. Failed delivery attempts that do not reach the Customer do not generate a verification charge.

Before enabling SMS OTP, make sure your team has communicated the Twilio cost to relevant stakeholders. Because these charges appear on your Twilio bill rather than your Gladly invoice, they can be easy to miss.

Conversation

or

Conversations

(with a capital "C")  provides a holistic view of Customer communications and interactions contained in the Conversation Timeline.

Customer or Customers refers to the people you support through Gladly who buy or use your products or services.

Channel

or

Channels

refers to the communication method used to communicate with Customers. Gladly supports the following Channels:

• Voice/IVR
• Email
• Chat (via Glad App)
• SMS/MMS
• Social Messaging: Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messaging, Whatsapp

Agents use the availability controls to receive Customers contacting in through these Channels.

Entry Points or Entry Points describe the method and configuration for receiving

 inbound communications from Customres based on the Channel they used to contact you.

Contact

or

Contacts

(with a capital "C") is a

phone call

,

messaging session, email, or voicemail. Contact(s) can be defined as an Inbound (started by the Customer) or Outbound (started by Agents) activity. A Contact can contain one or multiple messages (individual chat messages, SMSes, etc.) and is part of

a Conversation.