Talqui Workflows: your process, running on its own

Every company that talks to customers at scale has a process. Who picks up a conversation, when it moves to another team, what happens if the customer goes quiet, when it's time to follow up, when it's time to let go. That process usually lives in people's heads, in a spreadsheet, or in a set of rules that the platform imposes and the team works around.

Today we're launching Talqui Workflows, and its goal is simple to state: let Talqui adapt to the way your company already works, instead of asking your company to adapt to Talqui.

This article explains what Workflows is (and what it isn't), how it works, what you can build with it, and why it's an important step in where Talqui is heading.

1. This is not a chatbot

Let's start by clearing up a confusion we expect to hear a lot. Workflows is not a chatbot, and it doesn't compete with one.

A chatbot talks. It greets the customer, understands what they need, answers questions, collects information and resolves what it can. Talqui already has one, powered by AI, and it does that job well (it takes over more than 70% of the demand that used to need a human agent).

Workflows does something different. It's automation for your operation. It watches what happens in your conversations and acts on them: it moves a conversation to another inbox, assigns an operator, adds or removes a tag, saves information on the contact, puts a conversation back in the queue, closes it with the right reason. It can send messages and approved templates too, but that's one tool among many, not the point.

A simple way to see the difference:

• The chatbot handles the conversation with the customer.
• Workflows handles what your company does around that conversation.

Why does this matter? Because the hardest problems in a large customer operation are rarely "what do we say". They're "what happens next". What happens when a conversation sits in the queue for hours because the customer never answered the bot? What happens when a campaign goes out and half the contacts don't reply? What happens when a message mentions a cancellation and should go straight to the retention team? Until now, the answer was usually "someone has to notice".

Most customer service platforms answer these questions for you. They close tickets after a fixed time, route by rules you can't change, and treat every company as if it worked the same way. Your team ends up adapting its process to the tool.

"We don't want to tell a company how its operation should work. Every business has its own rules, and they are usually the result of years of experience. Our job is to give them the building blocks so Talqui follows those rules, not the other way around."

João Miranda • Founder, Talqui

2. How Workflows works

A workflow has three parts: a trigger, a sequence of steps, and, when needed, paths that split the flow according to conditions. You build it on a visual canvas inside Talqui (Marketing → Automations), without writing code.

Triggers: what starts a workflow

Workflows launches with six triggers, each tied to a real event in your operation:

• Session started: when a contact opens a new conversation.
• Session closed: when a conversation is closed.
• Message received: when the contact sends a message.
• Tag added to session: when a tag is added to a conversation, by an agent, a bot or another automation.
• Campaign sent: when a campaign reaches a contact, once for each contact who received it.
• Unanswered conversation: when the last message gets no reply for the time you define. The countdown restarts with every new message sent to the contact, by an operator or a bot, and stops as soon as the contact answers.

Every trigger can be narrowed down by channel and conditions, so a workflow only runs where it should.

Steps: what a workflow does

There are 14 kinds of steps, organized in four groups:

• Message: Send message, Send approved template.
• Session: Add tag, Remove tag, Move to inbox, Assign operator, Send to queue, Close session (with a closing reason and, if you want, a satisfaction survey).
• Contact: Save contact field.
• Logic: Wait, Wait for business hours, Wait for reply, Paths, Filter.

The logic steps are what turn a list of actions into a process. Wait pauses for minutes, hours or days. Wait for business hours holds the flow until your team is working, and moves on right away if it already is. Wait for reply waits for the contact to answer up to a deadline and splits into two branches, Replied and No reply. Paths sends the conversation down different branches depending on conditions, with an "Other cases" branch for everything else. Filter only lets the flow continue when the conditions are met.

Conditions: the details of your business

Paths and filters can check almost everything Talqui knows about a conversation: the channel, the connection, the inbox, the operator, session and contact tags, custom fields on the session or the contact, the contact's name, email or phone, who started the conversation, the text of the message, whether it's within business hours, the day of the week or the hour of the day. Conditions can be combined with AND, OR and AND NOT, using operators like "contains", "starts with", "greater than" or "exists".

This is where your company's own rules come in. "If the contact is tagged VIP and it's outside business hours, send them to the priority inbox" is not a feature we had to build. It's a workflow you draw.

3. What you can build: real situations from real operations

Every scenario below came from conversations with our customers. None of them needs code, and all of them can be adjusted to your own rules.

The conversation stuck in the queue

A contact starts a conversation, the bot asks a question, and the contact never answers. The conversation sits there: it isn't resolved, it isn't going anywhere, and it inflates your queue metrics.

With the Unanswered conversation trigger, you decide what happens after the time you choose. Send a gentle reminder. If there's still no reply, close the conversation with a specific reason ("no response from the customer") so your reports stay clean. Or, if it came from a high-value channel, move it to an inbox where a person will look at it.

Routing when something specific happens

Some events mean a conversation needs to be somewhere else right away. An agent adds the tag "cancellation". A message mentions "invoice". A contact from a key account writes in outside business hours.

With Tag added to session or Message received, plus Paths, the conversation moves to the right inbox, is assigned to the right operator, or is sent back to the human queue, the moment it happens. Nobody has to notice it first.

The campaign nobody answered

This is one of the requests we heard most from marketing teams. A campaign goes out to thousands of contacts. Some reply, most don't. What now?

With Campaign sent followed by Wait for reply, every contact who received the campaign gets their own run. Those who reply follow the Replied branch: move them to the sales inbox, assign an operator, tag them as engaged. Those who don't reply within the deadline follow the No reply branch: wait for business hours, send an approved follow-up template, tag them as a cold lead for the next campaign.

The campaign someone answered in a specific way

Sometimes what matters is the answer itself. A contact replies "yes, I want to know more", or taps the button "Talk to sales" on your template.

With Message received and Paths checking the message text, each answer can lead somewhere different: a sales inbox, a specific operator, a contact field saved as "interested", or a tag that feeds your CRM.

Respecting business hours and channel rules

Automations that ignore the real world create problems. Workflows was built with those rules in mind. Wait for business hours holds a follow-up until your team is there to handle the reply. On WhatsApp, the 24-hour customer service window matters: outside it, the right step is Send approved template, and Workflows keeps the two apart.

4. Built to run in production

An automation that touches thousands of conversations a day has to be predictable. That's why Workflows is more than a canvas.

Publish in one click, safely

You build a workflow as a draft and publish it when it's ready. Every saved change becomes a new version, recorded with its author. A run that has already started keeps the version it started with, so editing a workflow never breaks the conversations already going through it. If something goes wrong, you can go back to any previous version.

See every run, step by step

Each workflow has a Runs panel that shows every execution in real time: which contact, when it started, where it is now. Open a run and the canvas shows exactly which path it took, which steps succeeded, which one is waiting (for a reply, a deadline, business hours) and which branches weren't followed. A Metrics tab shows daily volume and results, so you can see if a workflow is doing what you designed it to do.

Guardrails by default

A misconfigured automation can fire far more than intended. If a workflow starts running an unusual number of times, Talqui pauses it automatically and tells you why, so you can review the flow before turning it back on. Automations performed by a workflow are also identified as such in the conversation, so your team always knows what was done by a person and what was done by the system.

Built with our customers

Workflows didn't start on a whiteboard. It started with months of conversations with the teams that use Talqui every day: what they did by hand, where conversations got lost, which rules they had to work around. It's one of the most requested features in our history, especially by marketing teams running campaigns at scale.

Some people shaped it more than anyone, and we want to thank them publicly: Luiz Anjos, Marcelo Alemi and Glauber, from [Company]. Many of the scenarios in this article started as a conversation with you. Thank you for the time, the patience and the honesty.

Where this is going: the backbone of your conversations

Workflows is an important piece of a bigger direction.

Talqui started as a customer service platform, a single place for your team to answer WhatsApp, Instagram, Web Chat, marketplaces and more. That's still true, but it's no longer the whole picture. We're becoming the operational backbone for your company's conversations: the communication infrastructure every message passes through, whatever the channel, and that connects to what your company already has. Your systems. Your internal MCPs. The chatbots you already use. Your CRM, your ERP, your data.

The difference between a platform and infrastructure is who adapts to whom. A platform decides how things work: when a ticket closes, how a queue behaves, what a conversation can and can't do. Infrastructure gives you reliable building blocks and gets out of the way. You build on top of it. You don't have to rebuild it, and you don't have to bend your process to fit it.

That's the path we chose. Every feature we ship is meant to make Talqui more flexible and less opinionated about how your business should run. Workflows is the clearest example so far: your process, drawn by your team, running on its own.

Talqui Workflows is available now in Marketing → Automations. If you want help designing your first workflows, or want to know how they fit into your operation, talk to us.

More from our Launch Week is coming soon.