What are Helpers in automation

When you need to automate a process in your CRM, you need to create a workflow. Workflows consist of triggers, actions and helpers. Easy!

To learn about triggers, follow this guide and about actions - this one. In this article, we will talk about helpers - events that follow the trigger or action and guide the workflow.

Here are available helpers:

1. Filters allow to proceed the workflow when a certain condition is met. For example, if you need to email a newly created Contact but only if they have Title "CEO". When you indicate this filter right after the trigger and the action "Send email", the workflow will send emails only to the newly created Contacts that are CEOs:
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2. Split path lets you build workflows to run different actions based on different conditions. Let us say, you have a trigger 'New record created' and then you need to send a drip campaign to your contacts. For this, you add a Split path that gives you at least two branches (you can add more, it depends on how many conditions you establish):
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In Branch A you create a drip campaign, in Branch B you create a case where an email is received (the 'Wait for email' helper) and you take away the contact from sending emails and change their status upon their response to your outreach campaign.

3. Wait for time. This helper gives an interval between trigger and action, meaning the action (e.g. send an email) will start in X days/hrs/seconds after the trigger was initiated:
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4. Wait for date helper makes a pause in the workflow until the indicated date is reached:
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5. Wait for email interaction allows the automation to react to opening/click of any email (or link included) in the whole workflow or a particular email or an email bounce for more detailed lead scoring or other scenarios:

​Dive into this guide to uncover all the powerful capabilities of the "Wait for Email interaction" helper.
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​6. Wait for email helper reacts to the received email linked to the record in a specific folder that you use in the workflow. This guide shows how we wait for an email when we start a drip campaign.

When your lead sends you a response, this helper reacts to the reply, stops the drip campaign for this specific lead, and updates their status:
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7. Wait for update. This helper will not start an action until a certain update is made in a record. Let us say, you have a workflow where you get new leads from a web form and send them an email sequence. When an email is received, Branch B will update their status to Negotiating:

Here you can add a Branch C and the 'Wait for an update' helper, to indicate that in case a lead becomes EXPIRED, add an action to set a task to follow up in X time.
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8. Wait for task completion. To have this helper enabled, you should have at least one task created within the workflow. Please follow this guide to see how it works:
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9. Create a step copy. This feature allows the creation of a full copy of an existing step with all of its settings. For instance, you need to have an almost exact copy of the 'Create a record' step with a dozen fields, so you can easily copy that step and change only the field that needs to have a different setting:
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10. End workflow. You need this step to put at the end of a branch that is considered a completed step.