Zapier

I can give you a quick specific example of a workflow or process I have automated using Zapier : we use Podium  to send out text messages to various students and parents. Each different department, such as the MedPrep department, has their own Podium  number with their own location ID. Similarly, the Education department and the Test Prep department have different location IDs. We have created various different workflows in Zapier. These are webhooks which are called from other scenarios. A form in Fillout will directly call this webhook with the proper data, indicating what kind of message it is and to which field or data stream it belongs. Based on that, Zapier can parse it and use the correct location ID to send the message out as text using Podium's module.

I have other automations as well regarding my main use case. There is one distinct functionality for delays where we can set multiple days of delay while running a workflow. We have leveraged this functionality for our employee onboarding flow, which starts a week before the employee joins the company. We create certain onboarding calendar events for them, maybe a week before, and then two days before their joining. After the delay is set for five days, all the accounts for all the platforms get created for them two days before their joining. We have other flows as well.

The delay functionality and custom webhooks are valuable for our organization because of how we deal with things at our organization by creating things in a very modular way. We will have different modules talking to each other for a specific complex workflow. A webhook is what helps solve most of it because we can create all the different modules as a separate workflow in Zapier with their own custom webhook URL and then call them or chain them together to create a complex workflow solving a bigger use case problem. Secondly, the delays, with having a bigger delay in number of days, gives the automation a bigger window to run in, which is not the case with make.com or any other platform that we use for automation. The delays on other platforms are mostly within the range of one to five minutes because the scenario needs to run on that particular go. With Zapier, the scenario can span over multiple days and it does not take up running memory. Rather than that, it goes to sleep and runs back again after the designated time.

With Zapier, I am able to handle workflows much faster. I have been able to reduce the effort the manual onboarding team and the operations team had to do in terms of employee onboarding. We have reduced the workflow time and made things more efficient and smoother and avoided any repetitive tasks in the day-to-day workflow of a team member.

There is a significant reduction in manual work and team members save time by eliminating multiple workflows which are repetitive in nature that the automation team builds for them using Zapier.

The interface can be made a little bit more user-friendly. Apart from that, it is fine.