Objective:
In this How-To, we will learn about the best way to create an Automated Holiday Closure Notice Schedule in Core iQ. We will explore the following topics:
- How to create a basic Closure schedule using Core iQ’s Audience creation tool
- How to connect an Approved Template to a Core iQ Schedule
If you have already created your Holiday Closure Notices using our ten starter templates in Core iQ, its extremely easy to automate the sending of your notices to customers/members throughout the year. If you haven't done so already, create your closure notices by following along with our How to Create Holiday Closure Notice Templates article.
Creating our Closure Schedule & Connecting our Templates
Creating our automated Holiday Closure schedule is extremely easy within Core iQ. With just a few steps, we can create a simple schedule which will trigger on every Federal holiday. First, we need to create a new audience within the Target Audience & Communications area of the Communications 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 Holiday Closure 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 want to send this email only to those over the age of 18, or we might look to exclude our own employees from this list. The choice is up to you, but once you have narrowed your audience to exactly those who you want to receive the closure emails, click Save and navigate to the Communication Plan area.
Within this Communication Plan, we will be creating a total of 10 schedule points for the 2018 calendar year. Create an event on your schedule and fill in the Regarding area with the relevant holiday name, such as “New Year's Day Closure”. Next, we will set the Trigger Event to Schedule Effective Date, and we will input 12/29/2017 in the Schedule Date area. This will trigger the email on this exact date, which is 3 days before New Year's day.
We want enable the option for Generate 1 Regardless of Accounts Opened Concurrently since this will keep a customer with ten accounts from accidentally receiving 10 Closure emails. Next, we want to tie this schedule point back to the template we created earlier. We can do this using the dropdown list on the bottom right to choose our New Year’s Day email template.
Once we have saved our 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 new Closure email up in the dashboard of our Core iQ Admin, allowing them to review the emails 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 email merge fields to populate with the bank President’s name at the bottom, we could change that here by selecting our Bank President from the drop-down list.
Once you have these settings figured out, it’s time to click Save. We will need to repeat these steps for all 10 Federal holidays, changing schedule dates and templates appropriately for each. We recommend sticking to a schedule that sends the emails 3 days prior to the closure date, as it gives your customers time to come into the bank if they have an immediate need. If all of your items are marked to Active, then Core iQ will begin queuing up your first Holiday Closure email starting on the date set in your schedule. If you marked the Default Status as Pending Approval, you will want to be on the lookout for the batch of emails that will queue on that schedule date, 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.
Maintaining Your Schedule
Since our holidays change dates every year, it is important to maintain your Holiday Closure schedule within Core iQ. What might be easiest is to set yourself a reminder to ensure that the following two things are fixed every year between December 23rd (after the last communication is sent) and December 29th (when the first communication for next year is sent). All you need to do to make this schedule work for the next calendar year is:
- Update your custom field definitions for Closure/Open Dates to coincide with the new calendar year.
- Update your automated schedule with the new Schedule Effective Dates on which communications should be sent. As a reminder, we recommend 3 days prior to the date you are going to be closed.
And that’s it! What might have taken you hours every quarter can now be achieved in less than 30 minutes. We hope that this tutorial has given you the chance to see how much easier your life can be by automating your schedules in Core iQ. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to us and we will happily help you.