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7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows to grow your startup faster

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows

Up until two months ago, I spent countless hours doing manual work I didn’t realize could be automated. Then, I signed up for Zapier.

Zapier not only saves me 10+ hours of “busy work” weekly but has also supercharged our customer support and sales processes.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard about Zapier. I’ve known about it for several years, yet didn’t signup until recently. What was stopping me?

I wasn’t sure how it could improve our workflows. So I put it on my backlog of tools to check out at some point. Really wish I didn’t procrastinate on it.

I’m glad I pulled the trigger and wish someone nudged me to give Zapier a try. So if you’re not using it yet, think of this post as that friendly nudge. I’ll share how we use Zapier at OpenPhone and how you can use it to automate processes, save time, and accelerate growth.

What’s Zapier?

Before I jump into our workflows, let me share a bit about what Zapier is and how it works. If you already use Zapier, feel free to skip right to the examples.

Zapier is a workflow automation tool that connects to and moves information between different applications you use.

So instead of manually copying and pasting information between spreadsheets and your email marketing tool, for example, you can create Zapier workflows (or zaps) to do that work automatically. Neat, eh?

Every zap has a trigger and an action:

  • A trigger is an event that you’re waiting for in order to execute a workflow.
  • An action is an event Zapier performs after the workflow is triggered.

Zapier connects with 2,000+ tools. This means that there’s an infinite number of workflows you can create. Let me share seven workflows we use here at OpenPhone to automate the boring stuff so we can focus on building a great product and delighting our customers.


7 zaps we use at OpenPhone

1. Get more customer reviews

User reviews are the ultimate social proof. 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations. You may have happy customers and a high Net Promoter Score (NPS), but that doesn’t always translate to having many reviews published online.

While many businesses work hard to delight their customers, too few ask for a review or a testimonial. Even worse, many ask poorly or at the wrong time. It’s important to strike while the iron is hot! After a customer gives you a glowing NPS score or survey feedback, you should ask them to leave a review.

We’ve started using Zapier to automate this process and ask our happiest customers to leave us a review. Once a customer has completed an NPS survey and has given us either a 9 or 10 (out of 10), a zap is triggered and the review request is sent. Here’s what it looks like:

Email sent asking for feedback from Daryna at OpenPhone
Zapier workflows: mapping out a Zap

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

  • Trigger: new entry for your NPS survey. For example, a new entry in Typeform / Survicate / Google Forms / HubSpot form / Jotform or any other survey tool you use
  • Delay: by 5 minutes. I add a delay so that the message doesn’t look obviously automated. There’s a way to delay it until the next business day too – this tutorial will help
  • Filter: reviews where the user gave us 9/10 or 10/10
  • Action: send or draft an email in your email tool (we use Gmail)
  • Action: send a notification to a Slack channel so our team knows the review prompt has been sent out

You can choose to automatically send a review prompt or create a draft in your inbox. Having a draft prepared allows you to personalize the email. A personal touch goes a long way, especially when you’re asking your customers for a favor.

⚡️Want to try this zap? Use this link and customize it for your company – https://zapier.com/shared/97c95f1826e28acb49d5dc02e41cef177b5c32c5

2. Follow-up on customer feedback promptly

A lot of times, you get incredibly valuable feedback from customers in your NPS and churn/cancellation surveys. Don’t let it go to waste. Thank your customers for taking the time to share their thoughts and clarify anything if needed. So few people do this that doing it on its own will leave an incredibly positive impression.

For these feedback follow-ups, we always personalize the emails. The feedback you get is usually nuanced, so it’s best to combine automation with a personal touch. This means we automatically make a draft of the message and then customize it.

Once you launch the feature or make the improvement the person asked for, you’ll want to let them know about it. They’ll be thrilled.

 Automatic email generated thanking for feedback from Zapier
Draft for my review in my Gmail account

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Updating trigger
  • Trigger: new entry for your NPS survey. For example, a new entry in Typeform / Survicate / Google Forms / HubSpot form / Jotform or any other survey tool you use
  • Filter: reviews where the user gave us 8/10 or less
  • Action: draft an email in your email tool (we use Gmail)

⚡️Want to try this zap? Use this link and customize it for your company –https://zapier.com/shared/72d4f86d2a72f72deb07599cb6cf1e02b27e235d

3. Send confirmation emails

Just like any startup, we move fast and test hypotheses quickly. This means that ideas start off as manual processes. If they succeed, we add automation to scale them. Many of them start with a Typeform.

For example, we have a process to help our customers port their phone numbers to OpenPhone. They fill out a Typeform survey and we submit their information to our partners. Another example is having users fill out a form to sign up for early access to a new feature. We use this for our upcoming Windows desktop app.

Many times, customers expect a confirmation once they’ve submitted their information. We’ve noticed many questions coming into our Support inbox such as – “Did you receive my info? I’ve filled out the form. What’s next?” Instead of being reactive and responding to these requests as they arrive, we thought we could be proactive and save both our customers and us some time.

This is why we’ve created a workflow to send folks a confirmation email as soon as we’ve received their request via Typeform. This helps manage their expectations and create a better experience.

Here’s an example of the confirmation email:

Confirming receipt of port request email
This is sent automatically from our porting inbox

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

 Mapping out Zap for port confirmation emails
  • Trigger: a new entry in Typeform / Survicate / Google Forms / HubSpot form / Jotform or any other tool you use for information intake
  • Filter: the person who has submitted a request is an existing user (we sent a different message if they’re a prospect)
  • Action: send a confirmation email from your email tool (we use Gmail)

⚡️Want to try this zap? Use this link and customize it for your company –https://zapier.com/shared/4c60f478bfad263629e324fce5cacff9143a5f45

4. Add leads to your CRM

If someone emails sales@openphone.co, we add that person to our CRM. You can do the same if you use a tool like Typeform to get leads from your website. You can push their information to your CRM whether it’s Airtable, HubSpot, Salesforce, or something else. This way, you can better track your pipeline and see how well you’re moving folks through the sales cycle. We use Airtable. Here is the collection of all CRMs that connect to Zapier.

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

Mapping out Zap for automatically adding leads in CRM
  • Trigger: new email to sales@openphone.co
  • Action: add email + first name + subject line to the inquiries table in Airtable (our CRM)

5. Log booked meetings in your CRM

If someone books a meeting with you or your teammates, log that in your CRM so you can see the number of demos you’re doing + your conversion rate on those demos. We use Calendly to book demos and connect it to other tools via Zapier. Want to see what scheduling tools you can connect? Check out this collection from the Zapier team.

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Mapping out Zap to log meetings in CRM
  • Trigger: new event booked via Calendly (or another scheduling tool)
  • Action: add event + attendees to the demos table in Airtable (our CRM)

6. Push Twitter & Reddit mentions to a Slack channel

Being able to engage with our users and the broader community on Twitter and Reddit is important to us. Yet, it’s time-consuming to stay on top of all relevant discussions on both platforms. So we have a zap that monitors our brand mentions and pushes them to Slack. This way, we can easily keep a pulse on what’s happening and team up on responding to different posts on social media.

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Push Twitter & Reddit mentions to a Slack channel
  • Trigger: new Reddit mention for “openphone” (you can add multiple keywords)
  • Action: post the link to the Reddit comment to the #social-media channel on Slack

And here’s the Twitter mention setup:

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Setting up Zap for Twitter mentions
  • Trigger: new Twitter mention of “@OpenPhoneApp” (add your Twitter handle or any hashtag you want to follow)
  • Action: post the link to the thread in the #social-media channel on Slack

7. Increase the number of event/webinar attendees

You’ve spent so much time promoting your webinar or event, but many folks who’ve registered don’t show up. Don’t let your event get lost in their busy inboxes.

We send a text message to anyone who signs up for our live demo and then remind them about the event 5 minutes before going live. We use Livestorm for our demos/webinars and connect them to other tools via Zapier. Want to see what webinar tools you can connect? Check out this collection from the Zapier team.

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Automatic text sent to new customers in OpenPhone
Sent from OpenPhone once someone signs up for our demo

Here’s how we’ve set it up on Zapier:

7 Ready-to-use Zapier workflows: Mapping out Zap for sending texts to new customers in OpenPhone
  • Trigger: a new registrant in Livestorm (or another webinar tool you use)
  • Filter: if the registrant submitted their phone number (we make this optional)
  • Action: create a contact in OpenPhone with the details of the registrant
  • Delay: by 5 minutes. I add a delay so that the message doesn’t look obviously automated. There’s a way to delay it until the next business day too – this tutorial will help.
  • Action: send an automated message via OpenPhone

✨ Bonus: you can create a custom tag on OpenPhone for contacts who registered for the Webinar. I put “Webinar”, although I could be more specific with the name/date of the webinar too.


If you’re hearing about OpenPhone for the first time here and curious about what we do, let me share more.

We’re building a modern and delightful business phone for small businesses and startups. It works right on top of your existing devices (via an app). This means that you can get a business phone number for you or your team in under a minute. It comes with calling, messaging and powerful features to help you communicate more effectively and close more business.

We’ve got a free trial so check it out for yourself and let me know what you think!

The OpenPhone Zapier integration is now live. Connect to over 3,000 apps and put all sorts of routine tasks on autopilot. Need any help getting started? Submit a request to our support team using this form. 📬


I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. I’m still new to Zapier and curious to learn what workflows you have set up on the platform. Please share them in the comments. If you ended up trying out some of these workflows, let me know how it goes!

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