A guide to setting up assistant bots for business-process automation
- Cirill Dubson
- Mar 30
- 4 min read
Here's how to set up three automations for the routine activities in a company.
Case 1. Automatic notifications in the work chat
If a process is monitored by several people, it's handy to set up shared notifications about task status. For example, you might need to keep an eye on the delivery of important documents into a client's hands. Status notifications can arrive in direct messages, or in an open or private Slack channel.
The automation is based on parsing email notifications using Zapier, Email Parser by Zapier and Slack.
You can set up notifications for any process whose status arrives by email — a subscription that needs renewing, error messages, requests from services, and so on.
For example, you can set up an automation with notifications from a courier such as DHL:
Register with Email Parser by Zapier — it's free.
Create a mailbox in it and give it a DHL email to parse. The parser's site has a good guide.
In the parsed email, highlight the key words — delivery status, tracking number, sender and recipient — this is the information you'll add to the Slack message.
Go to your Zapier account (or sign up there). That's also free.
Create an automation in Zapier (click Create Zap); in the first Trigger step, choose the Email Parser by Zapier app, and for Event choose New Email. There's a guide on how to do this.
Once you've done it all and tested your mailbox connection, create the next step — for Action choose the Slack app, and for Event choose Send Private Channel Message. Notifications will then arrive in a private Slack channel.
Then connect your Slack account and fill in the fields:
Channel — the channel where the notification should appear,
Message Text — the notification text,
Bot Name — the bot's name, e.g. “DHL Delivery”.
Publish and switch on your automation in Zapier. Done!
Case 2. Pre-filled forms
Pre-filling is when the fields in forms or documents are already populated with the necessary information, so it doesn't have to be entered by hand — all that's left is to check it's correct.
For example, we run an internship programme where a candidate leaves an application on the website and then fills in a form with several duplicate questions. So the candidate doesn't have to fill them in twice, we set up form pre-filling. After submitting the application on the site, the candidate receives an email with a link to a fuller questionnaire in which the duplicate questions are already populated with information from the application.
Automation of this kind helps create standard, recurring documents where, for example, only the number and date change. The bot reduces manual work and eliminates human error (a mixed-up date, the wrong annex number, incorrectly entered details, and so on).
You can do the same with Zapier, Google Sheets and Google Forms. Say you've already set things up so applications from the site land in a spreadsheet, and the data from the spreadsheet then needs to be inserted into a form.
Go to your Zapier account (or sign up there). It's free.
Create an automation in Zapier (click Create Zap), and in the first step choose Google Sheets, with Event — New Spreadsheet Row. This means the automation triggers every time a new row appears in the table. Once you've tested this step, Zapier will have assigned each column its own name.
Next, you send an email with a link to the form, so for this step choose Gmail, with Event — Send Email.
To — the value from the “Email” column,
Subject — specify the email subject,
Body Type — html,
Body — the email text with a link to the pre-filled form.
Publish and switch on your automation. Done!
Case 3. Auto-copying messages
We provide support to many clients, communicating with them in their corporate Slack, but we resolve client requests in our own Slack. To avoid copying their requests into our Slack by hand, we set up an automation.
Using the Push to Zapier option, the relevant message is forwarded into our Slack, noting which client and which employee wrote the request — so now our specialists can work on it. A message can be forwarded in a single click.
The bot saves a lot of routine actions: copying the message, switching between chats, creating a ticket and attaching screenshots of comments.
The automation works with Zapier and Slack:
Go to your Zapier account (or sign up there).
Create an automation in Zapier (click Create Zap), and in the first step choose Slack, with Event — New Pushed Message.
For the next action, also choose Slack, with Event — Send Channel Message in Slack.
Channel — specify which channel the messages will be copied to,
Message Text — the message text,
Bot Name — the client's company name, for example.
Publish and switch on your automation. Done!
Why bots are useful
Bots take on almost all the operational work and routine that employees don't want to do. Such work can eat up to 60% of working time — logging into services, entering information, copying data, filling in daily reports, and so on.
A human is not a machine. They spend cognitive effort more willingly on creative tasks, while in data-entry tasks they're more inclined to procrastinate. So the whole idea of handing routine tasks to a person who — in a good way — isn't motivated to do what should be done automatically is odd, and is inherently inefficient.
Kirill Dubson — Founder of Goprod.dev
Automate your workflows — and if you need a consultation, get in touch. There are plenty of ready-made solutions for different processes.
Created with love by the Goprod.dev team 💙
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