Approval Services

This feature lets you establish the clear and thought-through process of decision making with regard to the communication with customers. By assigning reviewers and an approver, you indicate the users who will be responsible for verifying the quality and correctness of the templates and approving them.

Decision making process flow in messages

In the decision making process there are three types of roles:

Regular user - A user who is neither marked in the settings of service approval as a reviewer nor approver. Such a user creates a template and sends it to reviewers to get feedback in the form of an approval.
Reviewer - A user who is marked as a reviewer in the settings of service approval. Such a person is responsible for verifying the template and giving a pre-approval. There is no limit of reviewers in the system.
Approver - A user who is marked as an approver in the settings of service approval. Such a user gives a final approve for template after the reviewers give their approvals first.

Creating a template → Review → Testing → Pre-approval by reviewers → Final approval by an approver

Tip: If you duplicate a template which received an approval, you will need to send the duplicated template to get an approval anyway.

Configuration

Go to Settings > Approval services

Service name - Type the name of your service. This name will be used only for identification purposes. The service you create will be displayed on the list of services marked with the name you enter here.
Microservice - Choose the microservice within the application you want to design a decision making process for.
Approver - Assign one approver out of the users who are added to a workspace. An approver is a person who gives a final approval to a message, without it the message cannot be sent. You can find the full list of users in Settings > Users. In this field you need to type the ID of the user. To get it, you need to go to the details of the user in Settings. In the URL address you will find the ID.

The exemplary ID of the user in the URL address
+ Add user - To add reviewers click the plus button. Before an approver gives a final approve to the message, the reviewers need to verify and confirm the template. Similarly to the approver, you need to type the ID of a user who will act as a reviewer. You can add as many reviewers as you want to.
All reviewers have to approve - Decide whether the approval of all reviewers are required before the final approval from the approver.

The approval flow

Regular user perspective

The first step is creating a template by a regular user. Go to Communication > Email > Template folder > Create new. In the right upper corner the green button allows a user to send the template to reviewers.
Then the template is checked by reviewers. In the upper right corner a user can see how many approves the template has been granted.
In this stage all reviewers have approved the template and a user awaits for a final approve.
The final approval is granted and the user may send the message.

Template status view in a template library

The user who created and sent template to reviewers is able to to see them being labeled with 3 statuses in Template library:

Approved - Confirmed by the approver.
Rejected - The template was rejected by the approver.
Reviewed - This label appears when the service approval configuration requires only one pre-approval from one of the reviewers and means that the template is being reviewed.
0/ the total number of reviewers - It presents how many reviewers already checked the template (when service approval configuration requires each reviewer to accept the template).

Reviewer perspective

Approved - Confirmed by the approver.
Rejected - The template was rejected by the approver.
Yellow labels - The template needs to be reviewed by the particular reviewer.
Grey labels - The template was reviewed by the particular reviewer and waits for other reviewers to be verified.

Tip:

In case when the service approval configuration requires an approval from only one reviewer:

Pending - The templates marked with a yellow label Pending require a review.
Reviewed - The templates marked with a grey label Reviewed are already approved by any reviewer.

A reviewer goes to a template that awaits for the review. Reviewer can either approve or unapprove the template. When the reviewer decides to unapprove the template, then they can write reasons for this decision.

Approver perspective

Template state view in a template library — Template status view in a template library

Approved - Confirmed by the approver.
Rejected - The template was rejected by the approver.
Reviewed - The template is checked by the reviewers and requires to be verified by an approver.

Tip:

In case when the service approval configuration requires an approval from only one reviewer:

Pending - The templates marked with a grey label Pending means that the template was disapproved by a reviewer

An approver goes to a template and gives the final approval or unapproves the template. Similarly, to the reviewers, when a template is unapproved, the approver can write the reasons why the template has been unapproved.

Approval requests

The users can check the whole list of message templates sent to be approved in Settings > Approval Requests.