Smooth Operator: build workflows
Describe an automation in a sentence — "when a contact is tagged VIP, email them" — and Smooth Operator builds, publishes and runs it.
A workflow is "when this happens, do that": a trigger (a contact is tagged, a deal changes stage, a task is completed) followed by steps — send an email, wait, branch, update a record, tag, create a task, notify, call a webhook.
Smooth Operator writes the whole workflow in one go and asks you to confirm once. It is saved as a draft that does nothing until it is published, so you can look it over on the canvas first.
Publishing is a separate permission, and it also needs every permission the steps use: someone who cannot send email cannot publish a workflow that sends email. A published workflow acts with its publisher’s permissions.
How to
- 1
Describe the trigger and what should happen, in plain language.
Name the event ("when a deal moves to Won") and each action in order. Mention any wait ("three days later").
- 2
Confirm the draft. Smooth Operator opens it on the canvas.
- 3
Ask it to publish and turn the workflow on when you are happy with it.
Publishing and turning on are separate: a published workflow stays off until enabled, and pausing it never cancels runs already in flight.
- 4
Ask how it is doing — recent runs, and why one failed.
Each run records the exact input every step ran with, after templates like {{entity.email}} were filled in.
Ask Smooth Operator
- “When a contact is tagged VIP, send them a welcome email”
- “When a deal moves to Won, wait three days, then create a task to ask for a referral”
- “What workflows do we have, and which ones are live?”
- “Publish the VIP welcome workflow and turn it on”
- “Why did the last run of the referral workflow fail?”
- “Pause the VIP welcome workflow”
If something goes wrong
- Publishing is refused with a permission name.
- One of the steps needs that permission and your role does not have it. Ask someone who has it to publish the workflow, or remove the step.
- The workflow is published but never runs.
- It is probably not turned on — ask Smooth Operator to enable it. Also check the trigger filter: a filter on a field the event does not carry never matches.
- You cannot cancel a running run from chat.
- Smooth Operator can pause a workflow but not stop a run mid-flight. Cancel the run from the workflow’s run history, or over MCP with workflow_run_cancel.