A complete rollout in five days? Believe it.

If you’ve had trouble getting your entire user base to take an action, raise your hand ...

If your hand is still down, you may be Skylar Damiano.

On his journey to secure SOC 2 compliance, Skylar Damiano, a systems administrator specializing in Mac Management and single sign-on (SSO), was challenged with getting his user base to take certain actions to better secure their devices and grant the IT department (just Damiano at the time) the visibility they needed for proper management. Being from ActiveCampaign, a MarTech company with marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Damiano created a very unique workflow to automate and track his success using their in-house solutions— along with several other tools from their tech stack.

Rolling out Okta to the company

The first task Damiano talked about at his JNUC 2019 presentation was rolling out Okta, their SSO solution, to the entire company (about 350 employees at the time). Once everything was set up on the backend, users would just have to activate their Okta by clicking a link and creating a password. Not a hard task to accomplish, but difficult to get 100% participation from a user base of that size.

Damiano realized how important communication was for ensuring participation, so he turned to ActiveCampaign to send his emails based on a series of triggers and employee data. Not only would the relevant, timely communication ensure a solid user experience and build trust with his user base, but sending emails out through a marketing automation tool automatically tracks the open and click information, which made it easy for Damiano to get detailed reporting on who has completed the activation or not.

However, he knew he’d have to rely on other software for his workflow to work. So Damiano used Zapier to build an integration between ActiveCampaign and Namely, his company’s HR system that houses employee information. This allowed him to access up-to-date employee information from ActiveCampaign so that his workflow was truly automated.

With the workflow built and well-designed emails coded, Damiano sent out the email with the link to activate Okta on a Monday morning. He set up wait steps between daily email reminders — sending only to those who hadn’t yet activated Okta. Within only 5 days, Damiano was looking at a 100% participation rate.

Enrolling the existing Mac fleet in Jamf Pro

The next big task Damiano had on his plate was to get ActiveCampaign’s Mac fleet enrolled in Jamf Pro. Since devices had been purchased in various ways over the last few years, Damiano knew he’d have to accomplish this with user-activated enrollment — another user action, within the same month.

Damiano began again by setting up workflows in ActiveCampaign that housed the initial communication and reminders. He used the ComputerAdded webhook in his workflow so that the team would be able to tell when someone enrolled their device and move them to the appropriate workflow in ActiveCampaign. Once someone had completed the action, that triggered a thank you email to celebrate the success with the user.

After only 10 days, Damiano was again looking down at a 100% participation rate.

With his fleet in Jamf Pro, he now had proper visibility into his devices so he could actively manage them going forward. It didn’t take long before he noticed that a lot of the Macs were on older macOS versions. He had found his next task, and he again started creating a workflow in ActiveCampaign. This time, he added a ‘computer number’ field to each employee’s record so he could create a Smart Group in Jamf Pro with out-of-date computers and target his communication to them to let them know to upgrade their device’s OS as soon as possible.

While Damiano’s solution used parts of ActiveCampaign’s tech stack that not everyone may have access to, he stressed the importance of understanding your own tech stack to see how everyone may be able to build an integrated, automated process regardless of what technology they use.

“Customer Experience Automation” (CXA)

Treating your users as your customers is how Damiano approaches his role in IT, and it has led him to some great success. Creating the best “customer” experience possible builds trust and leads to continued success with IT initiatives that directly benefit the company — and keeping the process automated, yet thoughtful, yields great time savings for IT and far fewer headaches.