It's been a busy month at Relay, shipping a lot of new functionality and content! Here's a quick update with lots of content and feature updates that will help you get the most out of Relay.
Spotlight: Customer Success
Over the past few months, we’ve learned a ton about the use cases where Relay is most helpful. Specifically, we’ve seen that operational playbooks that are mission-critical, run relatively frequently and have multiple people involved are when Relay really shines.
In particular, we learned that Relay has been specifically valuable for Customer Success leaders. CS leaders and their teams of CSMs and TAMs depend on a multitude of operational playbooks where it's essential that there is a human in the loop for certain stages. Think of playbooks ranging from customer onboarding, to re-engagement, to contract renewals and managing escalations. As we're seeing a lot of traction within CS, we're currently doubling down on excelling in this class of use cases.
For example, last week we built and shipped our first powerful integrations with products like Salesforce, Hubspot and Zendesk! Check the quick demo below to see how Relay can supercharge a customer onboarding playbook.
Product updates
In January, we've shipped dozens of new features and updates to Relay that make capturing and running your operational playbooks even eaasier. Our primary focus has been on strengthening the foundations of our powerful human-in-the-loop workflow automation product, including polishing many rough edges.
One particular new feature that we love, is what we call “double check” – a basic approval flow that lets the assignee review (double check) and personalize email or Slack communications that would have otherwise gone out automatically. You can optionally enable this feature for any communication step in your workflow. See the gif below for a quick impression!
While we're focusing on CS integrations, we'll continue to focus on evolving the foundations. For example, expect a much improved experience to manage data and variables for your playbook over the coming days 😊
Below is the full list of updates to Relay from this past month. Let us know if there’s any specific feature that you’d like to see!
🦾 Core functionality
- “Double check”: human-in-the-loop email/slack message approvals
- @-mentioning other people in automated Slack messages
- Inline images in email and Slack messages
- Conditional Sections
- Logical expressions to automatically set the value of Conditions
- Improved experience for setting triggers + support for pausing
- Form steps to get input from assignees (can even do this via Slack!)
- Ability to apply changes in playbook to all active runs
- New system variables: current date, current time, Run Owner
- Completing tasks via an inbound webhook
🤖 New Automations
- Airtable: find & update any row
- Slack: invite people to channel
- Google Drive: create folder
- Google Sheets: find & update any row
- Notion: Add to a database
- Notion: Update page in database
- Salesforce: Create a lead
- Salesforce: Log a call
- Zendesk: Create ticket
- Call outbound webhook
🎬 New Triggers
- Calendly: trigger based on a newly scheduled event
- Google Sheets: trigger based on a cell/column change
- Hubspot: trigger when deals reach a specific stage
- Webhook trigger for all your DIY use cases!
🤩 Usability & experience updates
- Revamped user experience for picking an Automation
- Showing step & section numbers across all relevant places in the UI
- Simplified user experience for sharing & collaborating on playbooks
- Tons more UI polish across the board!
Getting Started with Relay
To help you get the most out of Relay as quickly as possible, we recorded a series of short 101 videos to get help you get familiar with the basics of Relay. We hope they're helpful! Don't hesitate to reach out directly of course if you bump into anything!
Part 1: creating and running your first playbook
Part 2: setting up a trigger, advanced usage of variables, updating a spreadsheet
Part 3: conditions, sections and expressions
That’s it for this time – thanks for getting all the way to the end and follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter to stay in the know!
