How do you use Slack for automation?

  • 18 October 2019
  • 7 replies
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Userlevel 7
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With Slack's new built-in automation tool Workflow builder...

Meet Workflow Builder: the simple way to streamline tasks in Slack

...I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which we already automate tasks in Slack and possible new ideas along those lines.

With Zapier being a fully remote company we rely on Slack for everything from team-wide announcements and project collaboration to water-cooler chat and sharing pictures of our pets!

We use Zaps and webhooks to create bots to help us with tasks and also use third party apps to run things like stand ups and polls. How do you use Slack to automate things in your day to day life?



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I'm using Slack as part of a content curation system I'm developing for my blog and agencies Twitter account.

I do a lot of Twitter/blog browsing on mobile and when I find interesting content I might want to tweet or reference in a blog post I've often resorted to emailing the link to myself.

Now, I've setup some private channels in Slack and when I find a good piece of content or a tweet I'll share the link from my phone into one of the Slack channels. This then triggers a zap that turns this into a record in an Airtable I've got setup.

Going further, in the Airtable I can add some other stuff - an image, description/content, hashtags etc and then via a checkbox column I'll move the record into a view which will trigger another zap that will either post the content to Twitter via Buffer or to a draft post in Webflow which I can then go and tidy up and publish.


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@alex I know that you asked about Geekbot - I'm in a couple of teams that use it for stand-ups and it's a nice, easy way to stay abreast of everything that folks are working on.

When I complete it in the morning, it also gives me a clear focus for the day, and I can come back to if I start to get bogged down in small tasks that are taking me off track.


Slack + Zapier is how I stay on top of everything!

I set up about 90% of our Customer Success Efficiency workflows at Ambassador. I haven't dove into the Slack Workflows too much yet, but we have a lot set up in Zapier that flows into Slack.

  1. We have a weekly team meeting where we get together and share new learnings, so I set up a Google Slide Template for our deck, and each week I have a trigger that sets up the week's deck. From there, Ambassabot (just a simple Zapier bot) pings our Customer Success Slack Channel to remind each member to update their learning for the week, and to provide a link to the specific deck.
  2. I have a Zap to Slack me my meeting details and screen share info 10-15 mins before each meeting, and then sets me to DND in slack when in meetings, because I am often in Client facing meetings and screen sharing.
  3. A Zap set up that allows me to push a to do list from Slack to Zapier and on to a 'Things' to-do list.
  4. An outbound message set up from Salesforce that pings a private Success Escalation Channel with the case details for Senior Members to review and delegate help on escalated Cases, and also have the same workflow for Sales Escalations.
  5. But most importantly, I have a Zap that Slacks me anytime a new member joins the org, because I am our resident Slack Pet Emoji Generator 🙂


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They all sound really helpful, @chels! I'm definitely snagging number two!


I am our resident Slack Pet Emoji Generator

Woah, woah, you can't drop something as cool as that and not explain yourself 😜Do you generate emojis of pets, random emojis to be pets? Enquiring minds need to know!


I tend to get I generate ALL of the emojis! Mostly Emojis of Pets for our Ambassa-pet channel! I make our new members send a photo of their pet and I create an emoji with it. You'd be amazed at how excited people are to learn on their first day of work that they have a unique emoji of their own pet, it's huge for culture! Here's screenshot of the most recent ambassa-pets

Screen Shot 2019-10-21 at 8.56.32 AM.png


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@chels That was better than I could have hoped for 😍It's cool that every pet gets their own emoji!


Userlevel 2

The Workflow Builder seems cool, thanks for sharing!

At the company where I currently work, we have a Slack channel for sharing user feedback with the rest of the team. We use a product review integration with our Shopify store called, straightforwardly, Reviews. Whenever someone reviews our products on Reviews, a message gets posted in the feedback channel.

We also have a channel where Jenkins CI build results get automatically posted after each automated build of our software. That way we see if the builds are failing or succeeding.

I've tried to automate receipt of Google Calendar notifications on Slack as well in the past but that didn't go well. I felt I was getting too many notifications in too many places!


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