Understanding Plays

Plays empower you to proactively engage with your Contacts and Accounts at the right times based on a wide variety of factors. This could be usage of your product, their point in the customer life cycle, or their overall health as determined by their ChurnScore. Using Plays, you can automatically target these Contacts and Accounts with relevant content and messages that will help them get more value from your products and service.

ChurnZero offers two varieties of Plays. The first is One-Time Plays, which execute messages and tasks on specific dates and are ideal for date-specific events, like conferences or new feature launches. The second is Continuous Plays, which execute messages and tasks relative to an event occurring and are ideal for ongoing efforts, like onboarding or upcoming renewals.

Like Segments, you can create either Global or Private Plays.
Global plays can be used by any ChurnZero User, while Private Plays will only be available for use by the User who created them.

Note: A Private Play can only send messages to contacts that you own (via being either listed as the Owner, or holding a Role on the account).   Even if you use a segment that contains multiple contacts of different owners, only your owned contacts will receive the message.

Plays can target entire Accounts, or only specific Contacts:

• Contact Plays will target all contacts that enter the play. Only play steps that can apply to contacts will be available.
• Account Plays will target all accounts that enter the play. Only play steps that can apply to accounts will be available.

To access Plays, go to Admin > Playbooks. You will see three options: Drafts, Active, or Archive. Drafts are where your plays sit if they have never been turned on. Once they are turned on at any time, they will move to the Active Tab. When you delete an Active play, they will reside in the "Archive" tab to be used for reporting.

From either of the Plays pages, you can create a new Play by clicking "New Play" at the top of the screen. Then you can decide which type of play you want to create.

Note: These settings are final once 'Create Play' is clicked.

Once you have determined what type of Play you are going to create, you can then go into customizing the details in the Play Edit page.

The Play Edit page has three sections: 

1. Settings

Set up the basic settings for your Play, including name, description, and time frames. These settings vary depending on whether you are working with a One-Time or a Continuous Play.

2. Steps

Under the Steps tab, you can set Entry and Exit Settings for your Play. Entry Settings let you automatically enter Accounts or Contacts into Plays. Learn more about Entry Settings here.

Exit Criteria allows you to remove Contacts or Accounts from Plays automatically when they either meet a Goal or no longer qualify for the Play. Learn more about Exit Criteria here.

You can then set up the content of your Plays by creating Play Steps. Plays can target Contacts or Accounts, and the chosen target type will determine which Play Steps are available to be used:

When configuring Plays, you will see your Entry / Exit Settings and steps in the Play editor on the left hand side of the screen. You can click on the "+" at the top of a step to add a new step after or "-" to delete the step. The copy button can be used to make a copy of the step. You can also select steps and drag and drop on the editor screen to reorder. 

Wait times are shown with a clock icon on each step. These can be expanded to show the actual wait time by clicking on the icon or turning on 'Wait Details' at the top of the editor. 

To edit the details of a step, click the step in the editor and the details can be configured on the right. 

At the top of the editor, you can adjust your view by zooming in and out of your workflow. You can also save your Play workflow diagram as a PNG to export.