Parley's IT team cuts busywork by rebuilding workflows on Halyard

Parley is a customer conversation platform built for support teams. More than 21,400 organizations use Parley to send over 430 million messages to their customers each month.

In 2021, Parley was looking for new ways to let employees automate their own processes. Their IT team landed on Loopwise and started building workflows with its recipes. A year in, they found that the pricing structure capped the team's ability to build, and that the platform's thin change-control story was becoming a real concern.

Enter Halyard, and the chance to fix the problem while trimming and consolidating their workflows at the same time.

Marisol Ferreira, Parley's Director of IT, started her search with a long wish list in hand. Her team needed to automate workflows freely and safely. She also needed a pricing model that would encourage automation across Parley's teams rather than ration it.

And there was another hurdle. Parley had dozens of high-value workflows waiting to be migrated to whatever platform came next. They covered business processes like managing forwarding rules in Sundial Mail, syncing people from Tandem into Keyward, and automating hardware issue reporting and response. The migration had to be uneventful.

Halyard was able to cover every item on Parley's wish list, which included:

• Role-based access control via Keyward SSO
• A custom editor role without the ability to create or change credentials
• Governance through mandatory change control on every story
• All Loopwise recipes migrated to the new platform
• An interface that IT infrastructure, cloud security, IT support, and solutions teams can all use

Marisol first came across Halyard in 2018 and, although she was impressed by the platform's potential, it couldn't meet her criteria at the time. But she kept a close eye on it and checked in regularly to watch it evolve. In 2022, she was glad to discover that Halyard appeared to offer the functionality she needed. Now it was time to put it to the test.

During the trial, Marisol and her team worked with Halyard engineers to convert a complex user-lifecycle management workflow — around 18 recipes — into a single Halyard story. It was a good example of the kind of consolidation they were after.

Parley's onboarding with Halyard went unusually smoothly, Devon Achebe, Staff Engineer, Information Systems, tells us. “We worked with Halyard engineer Priya to migrate all of our Loopwise recipes across. That process was genuinely easy. We were able to move things over and make a lot of the existing automations simpler along the way.”

“It's remarkable to be able to say, 'Halyard just does this for me.' I don't have to think about it. For me, that's the biggest benefit — it just makes my week lighter.”

Marisol was particularly struck by the speed of onboarding, the flexibility of the platform, and the hours it gave her team back.

Parley is growing a culture of secure automation, using Halyard to remove barriers to entry.

Freedom to build

The previous platform's pricing structure didn't only limit Parley's ability to build — it created extra work for the IT team.

“For a long time we've had this goal of letting other people in the company automate their own processes, without waiting on engineers to have bandwidth,” Devon says.

“With Loopwise, every time anybody had an idea to automate something, it turned into a question for IT: is that automation worth another few hundred dollars a month? And I don't necessarily have the context for how important it is, or what it would do for the business. With Halyard, that isn't a conversation we have.”

The Halyard pricing model lets Marisol and Devon actively encourage teams to build efficiencies into their own workflows. “It reduces friction,” Devon adds, “and it lowers the barrier to picking the platform up in the first place.”

Let's look at a few of the critical and complex processes Halyard has helped Parley tighten up.

Employee lifecycle automation

Devon's favourite workflow is one that Halyard engineer Priya built during the trial: a user-lifecycle workflow he had previously built in Loopwise.

“This is an entire re-architecting of that workflow,” Devon explains. “And Priya just built it for us in a week. It ingests a JSON report from Tandem covering all of our workers, then uses the warehouse API to make SQL queries against HR data coming out of Tandem, and runs all sorts of complicated lifecycle automations in Keyward.”

Hardware issue reporting

Another workflow automates responses to on-site hardware issues. Say an employee wants to report a broken webcam in a meeting room: a QR code brings them to a Halyard page where they can file the issue.

“Then it opens a Parley conversation on behalf of the user, because our IT support team uses Parley for support. We're planning to integrate this with the calendar too, so it can move every event scheduled in that meeting room to another room, and stop the room being booked until IT resolves the hardware issue.”

Teams at Parley hope to repeat recent successes by extending the use of Halyard across the organization. The IT team plans to migrate their Keyward workflows over in 2023, and there are projects in the pipeline for sales engineering and solution architecture teams, too.

With an interface that teams in IT infrastructure, cloud security, IT support, and solutions can easily use, Halyard is helping Parley build that culture of secure automation faster.