Flow Variables
Add custom variables to reduce repetition & make sharing easier
Why Flow Variables?
Imagine John & Jane are two of your customer service (CS) representatives. They get mentioned quite often in your CS flow — they’re mentioned in a condition, or used to assign etc.
Now, John leaves because he’s decided to try his hand at organic farming (best of luck to him!). Since he’s left — you’ve to replace his mention in all the places he’s mentioned in your aforementioned CS flow. What a pain! 😭
Let’s take another scenario, you have a message flow that’s working wonderfully for your business & would like to share it with a friend so their business can also utilise your flow to boost their business.
Consider your flow contains references to many of your teammates, your CRM boards, channels etc. When your friend imports your flow into their team — they’ve to manually replace all the mentions of your teammates & boards. They’d also need to know the role of each of your teammates so they know who in their team is best suited to the same role. What a pain again! 😭
To solve this problem, we have flow variables. They are a great way to reduce the repetition of particular names, tags, custom fields in your flow & simultaneously make it ready to share with others.
Creating & Using a Flow Variable
- Open the message flow you’d like to add flow variables to
- Open to the “horizontal 3 dots” menu in the top right corner. Click “Flow Variables” there
- From the popup that opens right afterwards, press the “+ create” button to add your first variable. You’ll see all the variables available to you from there
- We’ll select the “Team Member” type variable to start with — we can write an informative name for the variable for others referring to this alongside a description.
- Now, when we want to assign a contact to our CS lead using the “Modify Contact” app, we can access this variable we created. It can also be accessed from conditions
Where can Flow Variables be Used?
Flow variables can be accessed from a variety of places:
- Any app — modify contact, create ticket, HTTP request, etc.
- Conditions — as both properties to check & in value matching
- App Triggers — to select the channel
