NB This functionality will be available to all those licensed for OneVu/OpenProcess Core via GCloud.
There are two significant changes within this release for OpenProcess. Namely the means to send notifications to customers via new channels and also the ability for customers to respond through those channels; with their responses automatically added to the notes area for a process.
Both of these are reliant on knowing a customer's preferred method of contact and leverage the following area mentioned earlier in the release notes:
VERY IMPORTANT
It is now possible to add multiple action types to a process step. But only the user's preference will be triggered.
This is important because if a process step:
- does have an action but
- does not have the customer's preference
I.e. only an email action is present but their preference is WhatsApp, the customer will not receive an update, as the action will not be fired.
So if you want to support user's being able to select different preferences you need to ensure each process that has an email action also has the equivalent alternative IF you also want them to be sent a notification through that delivery method.
New Delivery methods
Within a process it has always been possible to add 'Actions' when the step:
- is started and
- when it is completed
Prior to this release the only action was to send an email and this would be sent via IEG4's email service.
This is illustrated below:
It's worth noting that it's possible to add multiple actions of the same type even now. I.e. send different emails to different people when the step is completed.
This release adds the ability to add 4 new types of action on process steps that will send:
- Text Messages (via GOV.UK Notify)
- Email (via GOV.UK Notify)
- Facebook Messenger
We will walk through each of these now.
Each of these needs to be enabled by IEG4 support. Please raise a help desk ticket for the functionality to be turned on.
- Text Messages (via GOV.UK Notify)
Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. And, on average, it takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text and 90 minutes to respond to an email.
It's why we think this new capability in partnership with the new 'Sign up with a mobile phone number' will be such a game changer.
First things first, the text message service is delivered through GOV.UK Notify. Each council has access to GOV.UK Notify and is a best practice based service for sending notifications.
Linking OneVu/OpenProcess to Notify
To set up the ability to send Text Message (SMS) via GOV.UK Notify you first need to login to GOV.UK Notify using your council's account and get an API key. You do this by clicking on the API Integration option on the left:
For test you only need the option option but obviously when you are going live you will need to use the Live option. When you press continue you are given the API key as shown below:
Click the 'Copy API key to clipboard' option.
Once you've done this go to OneVu Control > Settings and click on the Api key for Gov.uk Notify setting option:
Then paste the key value in:
You have now connected the notification services to your Council's GOV.UK Notify API.
If you have not done the above steps this functionality will not work. Irrespective of whether you add the correct template id into the actions on a process step.
Once you've connected to your council service you need to create a new Text Message template. You do this in the 'Templates' area of GOV.UK Notify.
When you create it you should literally put the following in as the content:
((message))
It should look like this when you've created it:
You'll notice there is a Template ID. Click on the 'Copy template ID to clipboard' button.
Now go into OpenProcess and click on the process step you'd like to add an action to. You can see below the template Id mirrors what was copied from Notify.
So the reason that the content of the template you set up is simply:
((message))
Is you will set the content in the 'Personalised Content' when setting up the action. This has the added benefit of the fact you only need to set up one Text Message template id that you can use for ANY actions for sending text messages via GOV.UK Notify.
Once you've saved this, if a person has set their preference to receive progress updates via text message, and this process is started they will be sent a text message via GOV.UK Notify.
You can see the text message below:
- Emails (via GOV.UK Notify)
If you'd like your emails and text messages to both go through Notify this is possible and has the benefit of being able to reduce the likelihood of bouncing emails and also Notify provides some functionality around being able to see the content of every single email sent.
Before you can email actions to your process for Notify you need to connect our services with your councils Notify account.
Follow the steps as outlined for doing this for SMS above.
Once you've linked to your Notify service you need to create an Email template in Notify. It should look like this:
I.e. set the Subject as {subject} and the body as {message}.
Once done click the 'Copy template ID to clipboard' option and add the relevant action to your process step.
You need to paste the Template ID into the box below. We can see this id is the same as the one above in Notify.
You then need to also provide a Subject and Body. These being automatically passed to GOV.UK Notify:
Which results in the following email being sent when the step is start/completed (depending upon where you put the action):
Obviously a citizen only indicates whether they want to receive the notification via email. So it's best to ensure you don't also add a standard email action too or they'll only receive that one.
When emails are sent via GOV.UK Notify, you're able to use the functionality within the Dashboard to see all emails sent/sending/delivered/failed. You can even see the exact body of the email sent:
- Messages via Facebook Messenger
If you'd like to allow customers to get their progress updates via Facebook you will need to provide us with a Council created Facebook page. We need this as it is this with which the customer will interact with.
In order for a customer to receive their notifications via Messenger:
a) We need to have been provided with your council created Facebook page to do the set up
b) The customer needs to have linked their OneVu account to their Facebook Messenger account
c) The customer needs to have set their preference for progress updates to be Facebook
If you want to support this delivery mechanism get in touch with me (john.mcmahon@ieg4.com) and I will walk you through the process.
Assuming you've set up the Facebook page, we will link this to our services and the rest is about the customer linking their OneVu / Facebook accounts up to the Council's Facebook Messenger service. You can see below in the Customer's Profile > Contact Details, there is the ability to connect to Facebook:
Each council has their own specific URL and why we need the council created Facebook page. So the user clicks on the URL and then they type the verification code in. This connects the two up and when the user refreshes this page it changes to the following:
Until a user has verified their account as shown above, the option to receive notifications via Facebook will not even be shown in Notification preferences.
Like the other actions you need to add one for Facebook Messenger as shown here:
This in turn is sent to the customer if their preference is set to Facebook Messenger:
- Messages via WhatsApp
If you'd like to allow customers to get their progress updates via WhatsApp you will need to create a Twilio Account.
Owing to the additional steps that require you to be able to set up Twilio etc. if you want to support this delivery mechanism get in touch with me (john.mcmahon@ieg4.com) and I will walk you through the process.
Because of the need to support WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/SMS - we have chosen not to change the notes function in OpenProcess to use a rich text editor. As clearly these channels do not support HTML.
Two Way Communication
One of the coolest things in this release is the ability to also be able to:
1) Send notifications to people via:
- SMS (via GOV.UK Notify)
- Email (via GOV.UK Notify)*
- Facebook Messenger
*might not make final release build.
When a note is added to a process AND
2) For the citizen to be able to reply to these and for these messages to be added back to the OpenProcess notes timeline.
Essentially, where a citizen has set their preference for progress updates through these channels this will be recognised by OpenProcess. So if the customer's preference is SMS and a council officer adds a note it will be sent as a text message as shown:
The first text message was that sent when the process started. The second was generated by the officer requesting more information. The customer's response has been added directly back to the officer's notes. And because officer's are alerted when citizens add notes they will be made aware of the new note too.
If their preference was Facebook Messenger it would be as follows:
OpenProcess OneVu Search with Mobile Number
Owing to the fact customers can now create an account using only their mobile phone number it is now possible to search for customers using this:
Smaller Updates
- Fields present on Search Processes
We enhanced the Search Processes screen so that when a process is expanded the data 'Fields' on the process can be seen:
This ensures the fields data can be seen on completed processes too.
- Add a note on Search Processes
We enhanced the Search Processes screen so that if the user has the 'Update Process' permission they could add a note to a process on this screen - even if they were not assigned it:
- Add a document on Search Processes
We enhanced the Search Processes screen so that if the user has the 'Update Process' permission they could add a document to a process on this screen - even if they were not assigned it:
- REST API Step Editing
We enhanced the REST API step editor so that you can change request headers and mappings for an existing step without having to delete/recreate it.
- User completed steps and fields
When a user manually completing a step, if a process branch immediately followed the step, the branch in the process was not using fields that were set earlier in the process even if they existed. We have fixed this so irrespective of when a data is set against a field it can be used in a process branch condition.
- Allocated Worker Email Fix
Previously when a citizen uploaded a document/added a note, the email to notify the allocated worker was not consistently notifying the allocated user. This has been fixed.
Release Version Details
The following is the release version info for the version of OpenProcess, which has this functionality.
| Release Date | Version Number |
| 19/01/2021 | 2.1 |