The Hidden Gems of Zapier: Chatbots, Interfaces, and Tables

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we're uncovering some newer and lesser-known features of Zapier that can supercharge your workflows: Zapier Central, Zapier Chatbots, Zapier Interfaces, and Zapier Tables. If you thought you knew all there was to know about Zapier, think again!

Today’s Topics

• Zapier central, chatbots, interfaces, and tables overview

• Build an automated lead management workflow

• Workflow automation news

• Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 7 minutes

Zapier central, chatbots, interfaces, and tables overview

Zapier is now more than just a tool for simple automations. With recent feature additions of Central, Chatbots, Interfaces, and Tables, it’s a robust platform that can handle complex workflows and data management. Whether you're looking to improve customer engagement, streamline your team’s interactions, or organize your data more effectively, these features are worth exploring.

Zapier Central & Chatbots: Your New Automated Assistants

What They Are
Zapier Central and Zapier Chatbots are an incredible addition to your automation toolkit. These tools allow you to create customized AI assistants, leveraging your own data and instructions, to automate workflows around the web, onboard new employees, and even interact with customers.

Why They Matter
With Zapier Central and Chatbots, you can automate customer support, gather feedback, and even handle complex tasks like web research or report creation. They are fully customizable, allowing you to create a bot that integrates with your tech stack and data.

How to Use Them
Setting up a Zapier Central bot or Zapier Chatbot is straightforward. Define the directive for the bot, add additional reference data, and link it to any action within Zapier’s ecosystem. For instance, you could create a bot that schedules meetings when prompted by a specific keyword.

Zapier Interfaces: Streamlined Interactions

What They Are
Zapier Interfaces allows you to create custom user interfaces for your workflows. These interfaces can be used to collect data, trigger workflows, and provide users with a more interactive experience.

Why They Matter
Zapier Interfaces make it easier to interact with your workflows, especially for team members who may not be familiar with the backend processes. They offer a clean, intuitive way to gather inputs and present outputs, making your automations more accessible and user-friendly. They can also collapse the amount of software you need to use. For instance, if you need a form submission to trigger a Zapier automation, you can use Zapier’s Interface form vs. a 3rd party form tool.

How to Use Them
To get started, design an interface using Zapier’s drag-and-drop Interface builder. You can add form fields, buttons, and other interactive elements. Then, connect these elements to your Zaps. For example, a form submission in the interface could trigger a Zap that processes the data and sends it to your CRM.

Zapier Tables: Organize and Manage Your Data

What They Are
Zapier Tables is a powerful feature that lets you store, organize, and manipulate data within Zapier. Think of it as a lightweight database that integrates seamlessly with your Zaps, Interfaces, and Chatbots.

Why They Matter
With Zapier Tables, you can keep track of data that’s important to your workflows without needing a separate database or spreadsheet. They’re perfect for managing lists, tracking project statuses, or storing any other data your automations need.

How to Use Them
Create a new table in Zapier, define your columns, and start adding rows. You can import data from 3rd party services like Google Sheets, Airtable, and more. You can then create Zaps that interact with this table—adding, updating, or retrieving data as needed. For instance, you could use a table to track customer support tickets and automatically update their status as they move through your support process.

Build an automated lead management workflow

Now that you know more about Zapier’s newest features, let’s put them to work to develop an automated lead management workflow.

Here’s the high-level workflow on how to do it all with Zapier:

• Create a Zapier Interface with a lead submission form

• Add a Zapier chatbot to the interface with a company knowledge source to provide leads with more information (optional)

• Create a Zapier table to store the lead submission data

• Make a Zap automation to send lead data from your Zapier table to Slack to alert your team of new leads

• Within the Zap automation, add a ChatGPT web browsing step to enrich the lead with more data and/or qualify the lead (optional)

• Create a Zap automation to automatically send the lead data to your CRM and auto-respond to the lead to book a meeting

You can develop all of this with Zapier, freeing you up from your inbox, keeping your CRM data up to date, and hopefully helping you book more qualified meetings!

Workflow automation news

• You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft Researchers at Microsoft have developed a framework designed to make it easier for large language models (LLMs) to analyze the content of spreadsheets and perform data management and analysis tasks, because why not?

• Turn your diagram sketches into digital schemes A new indie product has dropped on Product Hunt that I think this audience of operators will find useful. Sketch2scheme converts your hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams into digital schemes. Bring your ideas to life with just a few clicks.

• OpenAI ships a new “mini” model GPT-4o mini is OpenAI’s new and more affordable model that outperforms GPT-3.5 Turbo while being over 60% cheaper. GPT-4o mini is touted as perfect for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks, and fast-response AI applications and workflows.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s specific automations for your business, AI and no code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

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