📝 Overview
The Kanban board is the day-to-day workspace of the CRM, where each lifecycle stage is a column, each customer is a card, and your team works across the board to move customers forward, either by relying on automations, or by stepping in manually when judgement is needed.
This guide covers everything you need to use the Kanban board effectively, including how automations and manual overrides interact, and how to assign customers to staff members.
💡 If you haven't customised your stages yet, see Editing and Managing Your Lifecycle Pipeline first, your stages and automation rules drive everything you do here.
🗂️ Anatomy of the Board
Before diving in, here's what the key sections of your Kanban board which you should become familiar with:
🟠 Columns | One column per lifecycle stage, and all customer cards assigned to this stage appear beneath it. |
🔵 Column header | Shows the stage name. Each Stage is displayed in the colour you choose for it. |
🟣 Cards | Each customer has a card, showing their name, email address, assigned staff member, and how its status is applied (automatic or manual). |
🟢 Filters | Above the columns, the filters allow you to narrow down the view by Customer, All, Customers assigned to you, and Unassigned. |
🟡 Configure & Email | The Configure and Email buttons on the top-right, allow you to configure each lifecycle stage, and set up automatic customer email notifications for lifecycle stage transitions. |
Click the arrow to learn more about each section
Click the arrow to learn more about each section
🟠 Columns
Each column in your Kanban board displays the number of customers currently in that stage, each one having their own customer card, and each customer card will display an accent on its left in the color of that lifecycle stage, which you can set in the Configure section.
🔵 Column header
Each column header will display the color you have chosen for it, the name of the lifecycle stage, and the number of customers currently in that stage.
🟣 Cards
When a customer is created or signs up with your business, they will automatically have a customer card created for them, which will display their name, email address, and the option to assign an instructor or staff member to them or the instructor assigned to them.
It will also display whether this customer card is set to move through lifecycle stages manually, or if it's set to do so automatically. If the customer card is set to do so manually, you'll see the "Manual" tag as shown below, and the option to "Revert to automation" so that the customer card moves through lifecycle stages automatically based on their registrations and purchases.
🟢 Filters
The filters allow you to filter the customer cards displayed in the Kanban board by Customer, and/or Assignment.
When filtering by customer, you can tick one or more customers, and if you don't select any customers in the filter, the Kanban board will display all customer cards.
When filtering by assignment, you can select to either display All (default), Assigned to me, and Unassigned customers.
🟡 Configure & Email
On the top-right corner of the Kanban board, you'll find the Configure button, which leads you to the page where you can edit each lifecycle stage individually, and the Email button, which leads you to the page where you can set up email notifications which are sent to customers when they move to a new lifecycle stage.
💡 For more information on how you can edit each lifecycle stage, check our guide: Editing and Managing Your Lifecycle Pipeline
💡 For more information on how you can set up email notifications, check our guide: Setting Up CRM Lifecycle Email Notifications
🤖 Automations
Automations are the rules that control how customers move through your CRM lifecycle pipeline automatically. Each lifecycle stage can be configured with specific criteria, and when a customer meets that criteria, they will automatically move into the corresponding stage.
For example, a customer may move from Lead to Trial after booking their first class, or from Trial to Converted after purchasing a membership.
Automations help keep your pipeline up to date without requiring manual movement of customers between stages, ensuring your team always has an accurate view of where each customer is in their journey.
Click the arrow for more information about Automations
Click the arrow for more information about Automations
⚙️ How Automations Work
When you configure your lifecycle stages, you set the criteria which a customer would need to meet in order to be moved to that stage automatically.
🟢 Conditions
You can set one or multiple criteria for a stage if you'd like, and then you can use the Conditions to select whether customers need to meet one or all of these criteria in order to move over to this lifecycle stage.
🟢 Criteria
Each lifecycle stage (except for the Lead and No Status stages) can be edited so that you can add the criteria a customer needs to meet in order to be moved over to a lifecycle stage.
The available criteria are:
Total registrations
Has attended first class
Has an active membership
Has a membership on hold
Has a cancelled membership
Remaining pack membership credits
Membership pack is fully used
Total no shows
Total late cancels
Has claimed account
Customer is blocked
Has a late cancel/no show penalty
Days since last registration
Has attended first class
You can use more than one criteria, and use the Conditions option to select whether customers need to meet all criteria or just one, in order to move over to this lifecycle status.
💡 You can add up to 5 sets of criteria in each lifecycle stage.
When you have more than one sets of criteria added, you'll see a red "🗑 Remove" button next to each of them allowing you to delete some, however, if you only have one set of criteria, this option will not be visible, because an active lifecycle stage would need at least one active criteria set up.
👉 Example
In the example below, we can see the Converted lifecycle stage, and the Conditions are set to ALL.
There's also two sets of Criteria added, so the Criteria a customer would need to meet in order to be moved to the "Converted" lifecycle stage, would be:
1️⃣ to have purchased one of any of the 7 selected memberships
2️⃣ to have attended their first class
Because the Conditions are set to ALL, the customer would need to have both purchased one of the 7 memberships set in the criteria, and also have attended their first class.
If they simply purchase a membership without ever attending a class, or if they attend a class but never purchase a membership, they will not move over to this lifecycle stage.
If the Conditions were set to One, then they would have been moved over to the Converted lifecycle stage as soon as either one of these criteria were met, as they would not necessarily need to meet them both.
⬅️ Advanced Settings: Allow status to move backward
By default, customers can move both forward and backward through lifecycle statuses based on the criteria they currently meet.
For example, a customer may move from Lead ➔ Prospect ➔ Converted, but can also return to an earlier status if they no longer meet the criteria for their current one.
💡You can disable this option if you only want customers to move forward through your lifecycle stages.
👀 Seeing Why a Customer Moved
When a customer is into any lifecycle stage, this action is immediately captured and displayed in the customers Interactions feed.
If they were moved by an automation because they met the criteria for specific a lifecycle stage, the criteria they met will be listed under that action, and the interaction will display that it was "Automatic".
💡 Automations run in the background. You don't need to keep the Kanban board open for them to fire.
👥 Assignments
Assignments allow you to allocate specific team members to customers, which helps ensure the right staff members are responsible for following up with customers at different points in their journey.
For example, new Leads could be assigned to a staff member which focuses on sales, while At Risk customers could be assigned to a someone who focuses on retentions for a follow-up.
Assignments help streamline customer management, improve accountability, and ensure important customers interactions are not missed.
Click the arrow to view how to assign a a staff member to a customer
Click the arrow to view how to assign a a staff member to a customer
To assign a staff member to a customer, please follow the steps below:
1️⃣ Navigate to the Kanban board
2️⃣ Locate the customer card you'd like to assign a staff member to
3️⃣ Click on the + Assign Instructor or Staff button
4️⃣ Select the Instructor or Staff member you would like to assign to this customer.
5️⃣ Click Save
6️⃣ The Instructor or Staff member will now appear on the customer card
💡 Team members do not receive automatic notifications when a customer card is assigned to them. To help ensure assignments are not missed, we recommend you notify team members directly and encouraging them to regularly check the Kanban board.
👆 Manual Overrides
You can manually move customer cards between lifecycle stages by dragging and dropping them from the . Once a card has been moved manually, it will no longer be updated by your lifecycle stage criteria (automations).
Manually moved cards will display a Revert to automation option. Selecting this option allows the card to once again be managed automatically based on your lifecycle stage criteria.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Find answers to common questions or additional details that may not be covered in the main instructions.
Click the arrow to view frequently asked questions
Click the arrow to view frequently asked questions
If I drag a customer to a new stage, do email notifications still fire?
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Click the arrow to see the answer
Yes. Notifications are tied to the stage entry, not to who or what triggered it. A manual drag and an automation both count as "entering the stage" and both will fire the configured notifications.
Can I see who moved a customer and when?
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Click the arrow to see the answer
No. When a stage change is logged in the customer's Interactions section, it displays a timestamp, and the source (manual or automation). See CRM Interactions and Activity Log.
Why didn't an automation fire for my customer?
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Click the arrow to see the answer
There may be a couple of common reasons a customer isn't moved to a lifecycle stage:
1) The customer was last moved manually, and their customer card was not reverted to automation, which means they will remain in their current stage until moved manually again, or they're reverted to automation.
2) The criteria for the lifecycle stage weren't met. Usually, when there's more than one criteria in a lifecycle stage and customers aren't being moved into that lifecycle stage, it's because the conditions have been set to "All" and not "One", which means that the customer would need to meet all the criteria listed, and not just one of the criteria, in order to be moved to this lifecycle stage.
If these aren't an issue, and your customers are still not being moved to the lifecycle stage automatically, please let our support team know and we will take a closer look at this for you.
Can I drag a customer backwards in the pipeline?
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Click the arrow to see the answer
Yes. The Kanban board allows movement in any direction. You can restrict backward movement by the automation, but this would need to be manually disabled in the Advanced settings of your CRM Lifecycle Status Settings.