Today, let’s explain another important term in the world of web application development: event-triggered messaging. What is it, why is it important, and how does it help your company? Let me explain.

Event-triggered messaging is a web application feature that involves automated email or sms messages sent on a pre-determined schedule, or based on application events. Messages can be triggered by any event, from customer interactions to changes in data and everything in between.

Why use event-triggered messaging?

Businesses often use event-triggered messaging to automate manual processes and save time. Without event-triggered messaging, employees must manually send messages at specific times, or when certain events occur. For instance, an employee might be assigned to email the sales department whenever a new lead comes in from the website, or might email reports to managers on a daily basis. This manual approach is not only slower, it’s also more prone to human errors.

Event-triggered messaging automates these processes–ensuring that messages get delivered instantly, and eliminating the risk of human errors or oversight.

How is event-triggered messaging used?

While useful across all industries and businesses, here are a few of the most common ways companies use event-triggered messaging today:

• Automatically correspond with customers: When customers complete forms on a company’s site, this can trigger an event that automatically sends a confirmation email to the customer.
• Alert businesses to problems: Event-triggered messaging can automatically send email/sms messages to the appropriate executive any time a time-sensitive business issue occurs, such as a customer account cancellation.
• Automatically distribute reports: Many companies set up their reports to run on weekly/daily intervals. Using event-triggered messaging, they can automatically distribute these reports to various department heads without any human involvment.
• Create workflow applications: Most commonly, event-triggered messaging is used in workflow applications to automate business processes. For instance, purchase order forms often require separate approvals from managers across multiple departments. With a workflow application, that purchase order form will move from manager to manager for approval automatically.

Demo of event-triggered messaging

While demonstrating event-triggered messaging is difficult is a single application (due to all of the moving parts), here’s a video that demonstrates it nicely. This video explains how event-triggered messaging is used to create powerful workflow applications. I hope you find it useful.

Of course, if you’d like to learn more about building web applications that incorporate event-triggered messaging, or just adding it to your existing applications, let us know. Just fill out this short form and tell us what you’d like to accomplish.