Certain job roles often go hand-in-hand with people who love to explore and play with new technological tools. We’re looking at you Solutions Architects and IT managers! You are the Indiana Jones’ of the office world, constantly searching for the next exciting development that you can share with your colleagues… hopefully without the landing in a snake-pit part. Although Indiana has snakes, you have bugs and support tickets – you HATE ‘EM, and unfortunately a bug or question is never far away, the finicky little things.
Our Solutions Architect, Sami Abid, is also a fellow explorer, and he decided to investigate how he could use The Bot Platform to automate the repetitive aspects of his job, so he could spend more time on the more impactful tasks.
Using the platform he was able to streamline data entry, disseminate information to relevant end users, resurface information at the right time, create timely prompts & reminders for actionable items and much more. One of the ways he was able to achieve this was by using our platform’s ability to store user submitted information in attributes and push these stored values to a down-stream system.
Building a personalized data input assistant
Every week at The Bot Platform we have department meetings where we keep track of various fields of data that give us an overall picture of company performance, although an important exercise it can become repetitive and every once in a while someone may forget to do it, or even miss one piece of information in their reporting… not Sami though! His Scorecard Assistant messages every Monday telling Sami he needs to update his scorecard. The message flow has a description of each scorecard which includes a link to the reports that helps him to retrieve the latest metrics. It then takes his entries and updates them to the central spreadsheet that his department uses and sends scorecard values to relevant stakeholders.
This has saved Sami a lot of time, made the data easy to access and has meant it’s become impossible for him to forget to fill it out or miss any data inputting – what’s not to love?
Automating meeting reminders and tasks
Do you sometimes feel like you need your own PA? So did Sami, but then he realised he could create his own virtual assistant and even name it after his favourite cartoon, Gizmoduck (not that we’re advocating for renaming your human PAs).
Sami uses Gizmoduck to add tasks to his task manager using Todoist, check any pending tasks and present them to him in a carousel and inform him of his meetings for the day. His digital PA also helps him to take notes by automatically setting up a Notion page, sends reminders to set-up weekly objectives and posts them to a Workplace group. On top of all the work stuff, Gizmoduck also reminds him to write his morning journal – something that Sami loves to start his day with to help with reflection and planning before cracking on with work.
Using The Bot Platform’s attribute functionality, Sami was able to ensure his virtual assistant was capturing all this data which, using our API’s and webhook features, he could then easily integrate with third party tools and services such as Notion, Google Calendar or Todoist. Then with the help of JSON webhook response formats, the bot can pull information from the above systems and present them to the bot user in a number of ways such as plain text, Markdown, carousel’s etc. The response message can be customised with images and custom action buttons so that the user can get the information to display in a way that works best for them.
An easy way to automate the work out of work
By using bots and digital assistants to automate the repetitive aspects of his work; adding tasks, creating pages to take notes, date inputting etc, Sami was able to reduce the amount of times he has to switch between different apps during his working day, which, when the average employee switches apps more than 1,100 times a day, adds a big increase to daily productivity and focus.
He was also able to resurface information about meetings, tasks and notes, post information to Workplace groups to create visibility and disseminate information in a timely manner.
These two bots have been a gamechanger for Sami’s day-to-day working practices, helping him to work smarter, more effectively and, more importantly, have more fun.
And it all started with a curious mindset, a bit of technological know-how and an easy-to-use platform that makes building automation tools, work apps and digital assistants a breeze.
Do you have an experimental mindset or enjoy playing with new technology tools, connecting systems or integration data sources using webhooks and APIs? Give us a shout, and we’ll set you up with a FREE trial account and, maybe, you and Sami can geek out on how a custom digital assistant could transform your working life.
