Ask a Client

What It Does Planned

Ask a Client is a step a workflow can use to ask one customer of your account a question and wait for the answer. The customer answers Approve or Skip. The answer is kept as evidence of who answered, when, and exactly what they were shown. The customer sees only their own questions, and only what the step put in them.

Your customers answer in the Approval Queue of your client portal, which is planned. Until the portal is built, a question can be asked and tracked here, but there is nowhere for a customer to answer it.

The Step Planned

A step names:

• The customer: one of your contacts who has portal access. A contact without portal access is refused, with a plain reason.
• A title (up to 120 characters) and optional text (up to 1,000), plus an optional Before and After (up to 500 characters each) to show a change.
• How the customer is asked: A card for our team first (the start, and the only choice for now). The run stops and makes a card. The customer sees the question only after a person on your team confirms it. Emailing the client directly, in business hours, is planned and needs its wording approved first, so a step that asks for it is refused for now.
• Days to wait for an answer: 14 to start, from 1 to 90.

Like every step, one an AI agent saves is saved off, and only a person turns the workflow on.

What Happens Next Planned

• Confirmed: the question becomes visible to the customer and the wait starts.
• Declined, or the run is stopped: the question is closed and the customer never sees it.
• Answered: the run goes on, and the step's value answer is approve or skip for a later Check Something step to use.
• No answer in time: the run goes on with answer set to no_answer. Nothing is decided for the customer.

Only the customer's own answer counts. An owner, an admin, an AI agent, an API key, and an assistant cannot answer for them. A customer answers once.

The Evidence Planned

Each answer is one row that is never changed or deleted: the question, the customer, the answer, how they answered, when, and the exact words they were shown. Each row also holds a fingerprint (SHA-256) of the row before it for the same question, so a changed row is found. People who can manage workflows see where each question stands (action workflows.asks.list) and the evidence of one (action workflows.asks.evidence), including whether the fingerprints still match.

Export

Questions and their evidence are part of Export Everything.