Objective:
In this How-To, we will learn about the best way to create an Automated Birthday Schedule in Core iQ. We will explore the following topics:
- How to create a basic Birthday schedule using Core iQ’s Audience creation tool
- How to connect an Approved Template to a Core iQ Schedule
Creating our Birthday Schedule & Connecting our Template
Creating our automated Birthday schedule is extremely easy within Core iQ. With just a few steps, we can create a simple schedule which will trigger on every customer’s birthday. First, we need to create a new audience within the Target Audience & Communications area of the Communications dropdown menu. From here, we will be brought to an area where we can define our audience using any parameters we want. The first thing to do is name our audience something like “Automated Birthday Schedule”. Once we have that done, we can narrow our audience in whatever ways we might want. Since this is, by default, an audience of all our current customers, we might only want to send this postcard to those over the age of 18, or we might want to exclude our own employees from this list. The choice is up to you, but once you have narrowed your audience to exactly what you want, click Save and navigate to the Communication Plan area.
Within this Communication Plan, we will only be creating a single contact point, our customer’s birthday. Create a touch point on your schedule and fill in the Regarding area with a relevant title such as “Birthday Postcard”. Next, we will set the Trigger Event to “Birth or Startup Date”, and we will set the Wait Time to “10 Days Before” our Birth or Startup Date. The reason we are doing this is so that our postcard will have enough time to be processed by Core iQ and then sent. No one wants to receive a Happy Birthday card a month after their birthday and selecting 7-10 days will give us enough of a buffer to ensure that our postcard is approved and processed in a timely manner.
We also want enable the option for "Generate 1 Regardless of Accounts Opened Concurrently", since this will keep a customer with ten qualifying accounts from receiving 10 Birthday postcards. Next, we want to tie this touch point back to a Happy Birthday communication. We can do this using the dropdown list on the bottom right to choose our Customer Birthday Postcard template.
When you have saved the Action & Timing settings, we will need to do one final thing. Within the Accountability area, we will want to change the Default Status from New to either Pending Approval or Reviewed and Approved. The first option, Pending Approval, will queue the birthday postcards up in the dashboard of our Core iQ Admin, allowing them to be reviewed before being sent out. From there, we will want to move to Reviewed and Approved as soon as possible, as this is when Core iQ will fully automate the communications. Also, if you want this communication to dynamically input the name of the customer’s Assigned Banker, then you can leave the Responsible Banker field as-is. However, if we wanted our Birthday postcard to populate with our bank President’s name at the bottom, we could change that here by choosing the President from the drop-down list of Responsible Bankers.
Once you have these settings figured out, it’s time to click Save. If all of your items are marked as Active, then Core iQ will typically begin queuing up Birthday Postcards starting after your next import. If you marked the Default Status as Pending Approval, you will want to be on the lookout for postcards over the coming week(s), as you will need to manually approve them. If you marked the Default Status as Reviewed and Approved, then Core iQ will take care of the heavy lifting of automating these communications for you.