This article provides a comprehensive guide to every option within the 'Settings' tab of the workflow builder. Learn how to configure contact handling, communication timing, sender details, and more to ensure your workflows run precisely as intended.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What are Workflow Settings?


Workflow Settings are the master controls for an individual workflow. Instead of configuring rules for each action, these settings apply to the entire workflow, governing its fundamental behavior from start to finish. They determine how contacts enter and re-enter, when messages can be sent, and what happens when a contact responds, ensuring your automation is both powerful and precise.


Key Benefits of Configuring Workflow Settings


Properly configuring your workflow settings is crucial for creating effective and respectful automation. These options allow you to fine-tune the workflow's behavior to match your business logic and improve the contact's experience.


  • Control Contact Flow: Decide if contacts can enter a workflow more than once, preventing them from receiving duplicate sequences.

  • Personalize Timing: Send messages at the most appropriate time for each contact by using their local timezone instead of a single, fixed one.

  • Set Business Hours: Ensure communications are only sent during specific hours and days to respect your contacts' time and increase engagement rates.

  • Automate Conversation Management: Automatically stop nurturing sequences when a contact responds, which creates a seamless transition for a team member to take over the conversation.

  • Maintain Brand Consistency: Set default sender names, email addresses, and phone numbers for all communications within the workflow to ensure a professional and consistent brand voice.

How to Access Workflow Settings


Finding and adjusting your workflow's core settings is straightforward. All configurations are centralized in one convenient tab within the workflow builder.


1.  Navigate to the Automation section in your dashboard.

2.  Open an existing workflow or create a new one.

3.  Inside the workflow builder, click on the Settings tab at the top of the page.



Contact Settings


This group of settings controls how contacts and their associated data, like opportunities, are handled within the workflow. These rules determine who can enter, how many times they can enter, and what actions will cause them to be removed.


Allow Re-entry


This toggle determines if a contact can enter this workflow more than once.


  • Enabled (blue): A contact can re-enter the workflow after they have fully completed it or have been manually removed. This is useful for recurring processes, like appointment reminders or post-purchase follow-ups. A contact cannot re-enter if they are still active in the workflow.

  • Disabled (gray): A contact can only enter and complete this workflow one time only.


Important Exception: Workflows that use an appointment or invoice-based trigger will always allow a contact to enter multiple times (per appointment or invoice), regardless of whether this setting is enabled or disabled. This ensures that every new appointment or invoice correctly triggers the automation.

Allow multiple Opportunities


This toggle is essential for workflows that are triggered by opportunity-based actions (e.g., "Pipeline Stage Changed").


  • Enabled (blue): If a single contact has multiple opportunities, they can enter the workflow as a separate instance for each opportunity. This allows you to run a unique automation sequence for every deal associated with a contact.

  • Disabled (gray): The contact will only enter the workflow for the first opportunity that meets the trigger criteria.


Default Behavior: For new workflows, this setting is enabled by default. For workflows created before this feature was released, it is disabled by default.


Update Behavior: If an opportunity's details are updated while it is active in the workflow, the workflow does not restart. It simply continues from its current step using the updated information.

Stop on Response


This checkbox allows you to automatically remove a contact from a workflow when they engage in a conversation. This is critical for preventing automated messages from being sent after a contact has already replied and is expecting a human response.


  • Enabled (blue): The workflow will end for a contact if they respond to a message sent from this specific workflow. This applies to all communication channels managed by the workflow.

  • Disabled (gray): The contact will continue in the workflow until the workflow ends.


Voicemail Detection: By default, the system uses voicemail detection to determine if an outbound call was answered by a person or a machine. This prevents a voicemail from incorrectly triggering "Stop on Response." This detection adds a slight delay to the call connecting. Inside a "Call" workflow action, you can find an advanced setting to "Disable Voicemail Detect," which removes the delay but means a voicemail will be treated as a response and stop the workflow. In that case you can set the call timeout to <20 seconds, short enough the call won't go to voicemail.


An article explaining how to combine Stop On Response and Disable Voicemail Detect is here.

Communication Settings


These settings manage the timing, sender identity, and conversational properties of messages sent from the workflow. Use them to ensure your communications are timely, professional, and properly managed.


Timezone


This dropdown determines the timezone used for any time-dependent steps in your workflow, such as a "Wait" action or a "Time Window."



  • Account Timezone: All time-based actions will execute based on the timezone set for the entire location (account).

  • Contact Timezone: Actions will execute based on the individual timezone of each contact. This is ideal for national or global campaigns, as it ensures messages are sent at appropriate local times (e.g., 9 AM in the contact's city). If a contact does not have a timezone set in their profile, the system will use the account timezone as a fallback.


History: In Workflow history you will see an entry for whether an action was undertaken in the Account Timezone or Contact Timezone


Time Window


This feature restricts when communication actions (like sending an SMS or email) can execute. If an action is scheduled to run outside the defined window, it will be paused and will resume at the next available time slot.


Check the Specific Time toggle to enable the window.


  • Start Time: Set the beginning of the execution window (e.g., 9:00 AM).

  • End Time: Set the end of the execution window (e.g., 5:00 PM).

  • Include Days: Select the specific days of the week when the window should be active.

Sender Details


This section allows you to set default sender information for all communications sent from this workflow. This saves you from having to configure it in every individual email or SMS action.


  • From Name: The default name that will appear as the sender for emails.

  • From Email: The default email address that will be used as the sender.

  • From Number: A dropdown to select the default phone number for sending SMS messages.

Conversations - Mark as Read


This section contains settings that affect how interactions from this workflow appear in the main "Conversations" area of the platform.


By default, when a workflow sends a message, the corresponding conversation is marked as "unread" to draw attention to it. If you enable this toggle, any conversation this workflow interacts with will be automatically marked as "read." This is useful for workflows that perform administrative tasks or send purely informational messages that do not require a manual review.

Frequently Asked Questions


Q: If I turn off "Allow Re-entry," can a contact with a new appointment still enter an appointment-reminder workflow?

A: Yes. Workflows that use an appointment-based trigger have a special exception and will always allow a contact to re-enter for each new appointment, regardless of the "Allow Re-entry" setting. The same applies to invoice-based triggers.


Q: What happens if I select "Contact Timezone" but a contact doesn't have a timezone in their profile?

A: The system will use the account's (location's) timezone as a default for that specific contact. The workflow will not fail; it will simply use the fallback timezone.


Q: Does the "Time Window" setting affect all workflow actions?

A: The "Time Window" primarily affects communication actions like sending emails, SMS, and making calls. It does not affect internal actions like adding a tag, updating a field, or creating an opportunity.


Q: If a contact has two opportunities and "Allow multiple Opportunities" is on, will they get two separate sets of emails?

A: Yes. When "Allow multiple Opportunities" is enabled, each opportunity that meets the trigger criteria will start a new, independent journey through the workflow for that contact. This means the contact could receive communications related to each of their deals separately.


Q: Can I set different Time Windows for different days of the week?

A: Currently, the Time Window applies uniformly to all days of the week. You cannot specify different Time Windows for different days within the same workflow.


Q: What happens if I change my Account Timezone while a workflow is still running?

A: Any changes made to the Account Timezone won't affect the contacts in workflows that are currently running through those workflows. The change will only apply to new entries to those workflows.


Q: Can I set different time zones for different steps within a workflow?

A: No, the Timezone setting applies to the entire workflow, not individual steps within the workflow.


Q: Can I set different sender emails for different actions within the same workflow?

A: You can override the default sender email by specifying a different 'from' name and 'from' email in individual email actions within the workflow.


Q: Does 'Stop On Response' end the workflow for all contacts if one contact responds?

A: No, 'Stop On Response' only ends the workflow for the specific contact who responded. It does not affect other contacts in the workflow.


Q: Can I choose which types of messages are marked as read with the 'Mark as Read' setting?

A: No, 'Mark as Read' applies to all types of outgoing automated messages from the workflow, including emails, SMS, calls, and voicemails.