Xperience by Kentico extends marketing automation with custom actions and triggers

Xperience by Kentico is opening up its marketing automation so it can be tailored to how your business actually works. The Automation Builder is the marketing automation tool inside Xperience by Kentico, used to move contacts through automated sequences based on their actions and activities across the various channels available. Across the June and July 2026 Refresh releases, Kentico is adding custom actions and custom triggers, letting developers extend both what an automation can do and what can start one, with marketers using both themselves. Together they mean automation in XbyK is no longer limited to what ships in the box.

Here's what changed and what it's useful for.

What is the Xperience by Kentico Automation Builder?

The Automation Builder builds automated processes that move contacts through a sequence of steps based on their actions and activities across your channels: sending an email, waiting a set period, branching down a different path depending on a condition. It organises an automation into triggers (the events that start it), conditions (the decision points that branch it), and actions (the steps performed as contacts move through it). It has always shipped with a built-in set of each.

What are custom automation actions?

Custom actions are automation steps a developer builds specifically for your project. Once registered, they appear in the Automation Builder interface next to the built-in steps. You use them the same way you use any of the built-in ones: you drop the action into a process and set it up.

A few examples of what these actions can do:

• Sync contact data to your CRM as contacts move through a process.
• Send a notification to Slack, Teams, or SMS when a lead reaches a key step.
• Enrich a contact profile with information from a third-party data source.
• Log events to your analytics platform.

The settings are yours to decide. You choose the recipient, the message, and the threshold, or whichever options the developer has exposed on the action. Your CRM, your notifications, and your analytics all become steps in a campaign that you build and adjust yourself.

None of this is a new idea. Plenty of marketing platforms support extensible automation steps. Developers could also achieve these outcomes in XbyK before with custom integration work outside the builder. What's changed is that XbyK now supports it in the product, so the custom step is visible, configurable, and reusable by the marketer rather than living in code only the developer can touch.

What are custom triggers?

Custom triggers, coming in the July 2026 Refresh, are the other half of the same change. Where custom actions extend what an automation does once it's running, custom triggers will extend what can start one. Automations will be able to begin from your own business events, whatever those are in your systems, rather than only the built-in trigger set. Custom conditions, for richer branching, are also on Kentico's roadmap.

Neither of these matters more than the other. Actions without triggers means tailored steps in journeys that can only start from standard events. Triggers without actions means journeys that start from your business events but can only do standard things. It's the combination that makes the Automation Builder adaptable end to end.

What does this mean for marketing and development teams?

The developer builds and registers the action once. From then on, the marketer uses it themselves, configuring each instance without going back to the developer for day-to-day changes.

That split suits how teams actually operate. Developers handle the technical integration. Marketers keep control of the campaign logic. Custom actions and triggers let both happen in the same tool rather than in separate systems stitched together.

Want to get more out of Xperience by Kentico?

Whether you're building on XbyK now, weighing it up as your next platform, or looking for a partner who knows it deeply, get in touch and we'll walk you through what's possible.