Introducing Knack Flows – Native Integrations and Automations

Hi there. My name is Dimitry, and welcome to this quick introduction to Knack Flows, our new solution for automating and integrating workflows. If you’ve used solutions like Zapier, Make, and other iPaaS solutions in the past, we’ll walk through how Knack Flows allows you to connect Knack to other platforms and automate data between systems directly from the Knack platform. There’s no additional products or licenses to learn.

Unified Platform Overview

What that means is that you have the Knack end database, an automations and integrations tool, and a front-end web app builder all in a single unified platform. Why bolt a front-end solution or tool like Softr onto Airtable, Knack it to Zapier, when you can do all of those things just inside of Knack? Knack Flow solves three major challenges. One, disconnected systems.

Addressing Common Business Challenges

This is a big problem for other toolsets because with what we have, we integrate multiple tools together giving businesses a clear view of operations and improving decision making. Secondly, manual work. What we have automates repetitive tasks, reduces errors, and frees up time for more important activities. And third, data silos.

Getting Started with Knack Flows

With our product, you can centralize data, making it easier to access and use across the business. To get started you can go to your Knack dashboard and on the left-hand side click on Flows right here. From here, once you click into the Flows, you can either start from scratch building a Flow or from one of our templates. Let’s focus on building a Flow from scratch, for example.

Creating a Flow from Scratch

In the interface, you see your Flows across all your different apps. So if I press “Create Flow from Scratch,” Knack will essentially act as a bridge to automate and connect Knack workflows with other platforms. In this case, we’ll be walking you through how to connect Knack to a product like Gmail so that every new item in the customer CRM ends up notifying you via your email and ends up messaging the people in a way that would make sense. As you can see, there’s a lot of different context here.

Setting Up Email Integration

And what I think would make sense is if inside of the record, you’ll see we have different lead referrals and whatnot, and there’s emails that you can send it out to. So say when a new email ends up getting added to your system, sending one of those contacts an email automatically through Flows is a very simple follow-up process for our system and great to have in your CRM workflow. So let’s just call this “Email Integration.” So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna add a trigger here and we’re gonna enter the app name.

So you can see all of the apps are here with their logos. So in this situation, what we’re gonna do is we’re actually gonna set up the trigger. So the trigger would be Knack, right, because that’s the starting point. And the event is when a record is created.

Right? And that would be under the Knack.

And then we’ll go here. Then what we’re gonna do is we can add an action. So that action would be—we can just add the Gmail account, right?

And we want to send out an email. Now we’re gonna have to connect our email account. So let’s connect our account right here. We’ve granted access to our system and it allows us to go through and send an email.

So if you press continue, it’s gonna ask you what you want to send in the email, which is totally fair. And you can actually search by field name. So what we have here is the ability to actually grab the record that’s created. So the email body is on the top, so we’re gonna grab actually their name.

So I’m gonna say “Hi,” and then let’s get their name. All we have to do is go back here and check your records, right, for the first one. So that’s gonna be contact, obviously. So let’s just make sure it’s contact.

So Knack.

Full, I think it’d be good. First is actually fine. I like having the first name, just so it’s a little bit more personal. So “Hi [First Name],” with a space between. “We’re so excited that you’re interested in our services.
Please book a call with us to discuss working together with this link,” and then maybe put a discovery call link there. So let’s paste this one out. Yeah. So you can put a discovery call link there, for example.

Alright. Cool. So email format ID. So choose a value from the list or enter text.

So here we’re just gonna do a text format. We could do HTML if we essentially wanted to make it more advanced—option here. That is something that’s pretty good. I’m gonna leave it in the plain format because it’s more common that people use text, but HTML is a great option to fill in the required.

Okay. So “From” could actually just be from the directory—our account. And then “To,” I’m gonna actually take the email from the record that was created. So the new Knack email, essentially.

So fill in required “To”—so it’s an email. Subject:

“Let’s work together.” And then I’m gonna grab their first name. Right? And then exclamation point.

So you got “Show all fields.” If you want to BCC anybody, like someone on your team, you could totally add an email there. But I’m gonna save this. Okay?

Testing the Integration

So after we save this, what we have is an automation setup. So we’re gonna test the integration to see it in action. The test capabilities are only available for API triggers. So what I’m gonna do actually is I’m gonna press this to set it up.

Okay? And what I’m gonna do is I can test it by going into records and add a record here. It’s gonna be Jim Baker. And you could totally see a situation where someone on the team can set up a lead form and then we could fill out that lead form.

And when it comes into Knack, it essentially would send an email out back to the person asking the person to book the time. So let’s say, founder company: Knack Inc. And then we can just put my example email here. So I’m just gonna actually put my secondary email.

Alright. So Jim Baker is gonna be here. If I press “Update Data,” you’ll see it sent out an email. That is so cool.

And if I go to my sent, you see it says, “Let’s work together, Jim.”
“Hi Jim, we’re so excited that you’re interested in our services. Please book a call with us to discuss working together with this link.”

Yep. And then the person could book a discovery call here. Perfect. Now this is just one example of what you can do here.

Exploring Additional Flow Options

You can do so much with the different Flows inside of the system. You don’t have to have it trigger through a Knack instance. It can be with other APIs. And that’s why we really think this is gonna be a great solution for you because you have so many options to choose from.

There’s gonna be a myriad of different options for you to pick from. And whatever trigger you’re interested in, we are looking to add that to our system in order to give you the best all-in-one solution possible.

Managing and Monitoring Flows

Now this is saved and added to our system. And if I wanted to stop it, I could press pause and then anytime press start again in order to bring it back to being on. And we could always go to the flow log to check the results and go back to the flow builder to pause it and then edit it again. You can always change the name of any of the steps and after you change it, it kind of gives you just a bit of a better understanding of what the reason it’s there is, because sometimes people will make automations and forget.

So we can just say “New Contact Added” and just say “Email Follow-up Sent to Contact” and press start again just to give us that insight. And from there, you can make adjustments if needed if there’s anything that’s out of whack. And just a note as well, we also have the overall history tab here so you can see it through everything, whether it be for the groups that I’m in right now. So I’m in the custom CRM, but if I was in another one, it would show a different group here.

You can change the date range. There’s a bunch of quick filters to change it to things like last seven days, last thirty days, and even the time of day as well. You can filter it by different automation runs that have an error and other ones as well. And you could also see the same overall analytics similar to what I showed you with that specific Flow analytics.

Final Thoughts on Using Knack

And on this Flow page now, you can see the option here to go back into Flow settings, to check out the log, to copy this, to rename it, and do a lot of the similar things you can do in pretty much like any platform. And that’s it. You’ve set up a Knack Flow. Experience the ease of Knack’s no-code interface to customize workflows tailored to your unique business needs.

Automate manual tasks, synchronize information across platforms, and spend way less time managing software and more time growing your business. Thank you so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next one.