Roles

In many workflows, a step can be assigned to our executed by multiple different users. For example, in a Customer Onboarding workflow, you may have a different Customer Success person in different workflows. To support this experience, Relay.app has a concept called a Role.

When creating a workflow, it's possible to assign human-in-the-loop steps to a Role rather than a specific user. It's also possible to specific that automations should run on behalf of a Role rather than a specific user. Roles are then assigned when the workflow runs in one of two ways.

Assigning Roles

Roles in Relay.app are assigned via the Assign a Role step type, which can look up a user in a connected app to populate the Role for that workflow run. For example, you may want to look up the customer success person for a given account in Salesforce on a spreadsheet.

Assigning a role automatically based on an item in a spreadsheet

Using Roles in Human-in-the-loop Steps

Once you've defined a Role, you can make that Role the assignee in human-in-the-loop steps, like Approvals and Tasks.

Assigning an approval to a Role

Using Roles in Automations

You can also use Roles to run automations, for example if you want an email to be sent on behalf of the right Customer Success person. To do this, select the "Run as" button in the top right of the automation panel and select the Role.

Any time a user is assigned to a role that runs an automation, the user will need to authorize that the automation can be run on their behalf. To make this seamless, it's useful to enumerate the set of expected role assignees and ensuring they've all connected the relevant app. If the role is assigned to someone that has not yet connected the relevant app, they'll receive an error notification to connect that app.

Running an automation as a Role.