Terms Reference

Action - An action is a node in your flow. For example, Send Message, Update the Contact and Send Email are actions.

Administrator Role - A workspace administrator has complete control over a workspace. They can change settings, add or delete logins, and more. Admins can access and edit all aspects of your workspace, including flows, campaigns, contacts, and messages.

Agent Role - An agent is a user you can add to your workspace. Agents have access to Tickets to communicate with your contacts.

Campaign & Campaign Event - Campaigns allow you to schedule messages and workflows relative to a date for a contact, such as the date a contact was created or the date a contact joined a group. A campaign event is the specific message or flow to be started within a campaign.

Channel - Channels allow you to send and receive messages or phone calls through your workspace. Examples of channels include SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. You can add multiple channels to your workspace, including multiple channels of the same type.

Contact - A contact is an end user who has interacted or will interact with your workspace.

Contact Field - Each contact can be assigned attributes, called contact fields, that hold values such as their names, phone numbers, and any other individual information you want to include.

Dashboard - The dashboard in your workspace gives you an overview of incoming and outgoing messages by week, month, year, or for all time.

Editor Role - Editors can edit flows, campaigns, triggers, and contacts, send messages, start flows, export contacts and messages, and import and export flows. Editors cannot make changes to the workspace's home page, which includes managing account roles, changing language or timezone settings, and adding and removing channels.

Expression - Expressions allow you to customize messages in your flows. For example, you can perform arithmetic or use built-in functions for more complex tasks like formatting dates and times.

Flow - A flow is a visual representation of conditional branch logic that's applied to your contacts once they enter the flow.

Flow Editor - The flow editor is where you build and edit your flows. To open the editor for a flow, go to the Flows tab and click the flow's name.

Global Variable - A global variable is a shared value that can be used across your workspace, which makes frequently used values much simpler to reference.

Label - You can create labels for flows, messages, and responses to better organize the data in your workspace.

Logs - You can view channel message and call logs, which show all messages and calls sent and received through a specific channel (click the channel section on your workspace page); flow start logs, which show when flows were started and by whom; and the message history logs for individual contacts.

Login - A login is a unique user in your workspace. An administrator can invite new users and edit or remove logins.

Node - A node is a step in your flow. It can be either an action or a split action, like Wait for Response.

Node Exits - Node exits are the routes that contacts can take in your flow logic. Each exit is shown as a dot, and a red dot means the contact will be removed from the flow.

Outbox - Occasionally, errors can occur with your channels. When this happens, messages may not send properly and will go to your outbox, where they are queued to be sent.

Parent & Child Flows - Within a flow, you can use the Enter A Flow action to start another flow. The original flow is called the "parent" and the newly started flow is the "child". This is useful when you want a contact to pass through a different flow before moving forward in the parent flow. Once the child flow is completed, the contact returns to the parent flow.

Parent & Child Variables - In child flows, entered through the Enter A Flow action, @parent can be used to reference the flow results collected in the previous (parent) flow, e.g. @parent.field. Likewise, @child can be used in the parent flow to reference flow results collected by the child flow up to the point the contact either finished the child flow or expired from it.

Resthook - You can create flow events that external services can subscribe to. For example, Zapier can subscribe to flow events you create and trigger any number of Zapier integrations when they occur in your flows.

Results - Results give you an overview of your flow, with analytics on messages and runs and data on all activity in your flow from start to finish.

Run - A run is a contact's passage through a flow from entrance to exit, including all activity that takes place in between. Contacts exit a flow when they complete the flow, start another flow via the Enter A Flow action, or expire from the flow after the period of inactivity you designate.

Start a Flow - Start a flow manually from within the flow editor with the Start Flow button, via a keyword trigger, on a schedule or in the future, as part of a campaign, or after receiving a call.

Tickets - Use TextIt's ticketing service in your flows to escalate communications to human agents. Tickets make it easy to escalate contacts from automated flows to human agents, so your team can assign, respond to, and close tickets without leaving your workspace.

Trigger - Triggers allow you to control how or when a flow begins. A flow can be triggered by a keyword, when receiving a call, when receiving a message not handled elsewhere, when a contact initiates a conversation, or when Facebook refers a contact. A trigger can also schedule a flow to start on a future date.

URN - A URN is an address for your contact, such as a phone number or email address. A single contact can have multiple URNs.

Variable - Variables are used to reference values such as @contact.first_name or @urns.mailto. These can be contact variables like name or group, URNs like phone number, response results in a flow, external variables passed from Zapier or a webhook, and global variables that are shared values across your workspace. See our full reference guide here.

Viewer Role - Viewers can see every aspect of the workspace but can't modify anything. For example, they can't edit flows or contacts, and they can't send messages.

Workspace - Your workspace is your project's data lives, and it can contain multiple child workspaces. It's where you manage your flows, contacts, and messages.