Zapier
Zapier is a service lets you connect over 2000 apps together, without having to write code. Wrangle integrates with Zapier so that you can tie your Slack-focused workflows together with the apps your teams use.
In Zapier, an event in one app triggers an action in another app. Zapier calls this a "Zap." You can use Wrangle as either the trigger or as the action in your Zaps.
When a Wrangle workflow is completed, Wrangle can trigger actions in other apps. When Wrangle is used as a trigger, you can send the data from your intake form to the other app.
For example, if you have an employee onboarding flow, you can automatically add the employee to your HR system when your Wrangle steps are completed. Or, if you were approving sales contracts, you could automatically update the deal record in your CRM once you've gotten the requisite approvals in Wrangle.
When something happens in another app, you can trigger Wrangle to start a workflow. You can use data from the other app triggering Wrangle to pre-fill in data in the Intake Form of your workflow.
For example, when a customer purchases something in Shopify, you could trigger a warehouse activity workflow in Wrangle. Or, if a deal is moved to the quoting stage in your sales pipeline, you could trigger your Wrangle workflow that gets the services team to put together an hours estimate for the quote.
You'll need two things to use Wrangle's Zapier integration:
- 1.The private invitation link to use Wrangle's Zapier integration. Since Wrangle's integration is in public beta, you cannot find Wrangle on Zapier without the link.
- 2.Your credentials to connect Wrangle to Zapier. You'll need your Slack User ID, Slack Workspace ID, and a Wrangle API key.
Once you've gone to the integrations page, you'll see an "Accept Invite on Zapier" button. Click that and you'll be taken to a Zapier web page to accept the invitation to the Wrangle beta on Zapier. That page looks like this:
Once you click the Zapier Invite Link, you'll be taken to this page.
Click on the "Accept Invite & Build a Zap" button to get started. If you're not taken immediately to Zapier's Zap Builder, then click "Create a Zap". If you've never used Zapier before, check out their help docs on building Zaps.
Then you'll need to decide whether you're using Wrangle as a Trigger or as an Action — once you've made your choice, follow the corresponding instructions below.
Wrangle provides one Zapier Trigger to start a Zap when a Wrangle workflow has been completed. This trigger will fire each time that the workflow's steps have been completed.
When you're creating a Zap, you'll see the first step is to pick a Trigger. Search for Wrangle and choose it:
Choosing Wrangle as your Trigger.
When you pick Wrangle, you'll then be asked to choose which Wrangle Trigger to use. There is only one choice: "Workflow Completed".
Choosing "Workflow Completed" as the Trigger
Next, you'll need to choose an account. If you haven't yet connected your Wrangle account, click on "Connect a new Account" and provide the credentials listed on the Integrations page of Wrangle's App Home in Slack.
Here's what your Zap should look like once you've connected and chosen an account:
Choosing which Wrangle Account to use in your Zap Trigger.
From there, you'll need to choose which Wrangle workflow in your account to use with this Trigger. If you don't have any, you'll need to design a workflow first.
Here's what it looks like when you're choosing which workflow to use. Note: you'll see your workflows in the list, these are the ones we have in our account.
Choosing which workflow to use in your Trigger.
Once you've chosen a workflow to use, Zapier will prompt you to test your Trigger. By testing, Zapier will ask Wrangle for any recently completed instances of your workflow. Wrangle will use the intake form data from one of these completed instances to know what data you can provide to other apps in your Zap.
If you've never tested and completed all the steps in your workflow, you'll want to do that first. Otherwise, Zapier will not find any and won't allow you to proceed with using this workflow in your Zap.
If your test is successful, Zapier will show you some data from the most recently completed instance of the workflow. Here's what ours looked like at this stage (note: yours will have very different "formData" based on your own intake form):
Getting test data from your Wrangle Workflow.
From there, you move on to deciding on the Action you want to be triggered by completing your Wrangle workflow. You can insert any of the data from your workflow inside the Action, to pass data from Wrangle to the other app:
Inserting data from your Wrangle Trigger into your Action.
Every workflow has two sets of data you can pass along to other apps in the Action step of your Zap:
- Metadata about the workflow
- Custom intake form data
Wrangle will pass along certain metadata about the workflow instance that was completed:
- Workflow Started Time: this is the date and time when the workflow was started (usually when the intake form was submitted by someone, unless it was started by Zapier),
- Workflow Completed Time: this is the date and time when the last workflow step was completed.
- Workflow Instance ID: this is a unique identifier for this particular run of your workflow. Each time the workflow is started, it gets a unique ID. For instance, if you're doing employee onboarding, each employee that you onboard will start a new workflow instance that will have a unique ID.
- Requester ID: this is the Slack User ID of the person who started the workflow instance. You can use this Slack User ID with Slack's Zapier integration to get even more information about this person if you need to, like their email address.
- Requester Name: this is the name of the person who started the workflow instance (we get their name from their display name in Slack).
We also pass along data from all fields in the intake form. You'll see a form data entry for each of these. If you have optional fields in your intake form, that data may not be passed along.
If you have a "Pick a User" field in your intake form, note that Wrangle will pass the Slack User ID of the person that was chosen. You can use the Slack integration with Zapier to lookup more information about that person, like their name or email address.
Zapier Triggers are checked every few minutes, up to every 15 minutes. If you are testing your Zap and don't see it firing right away, give it a few minutes.
Wrangle has one Zapier Action you can use to start a Wrangle workflow. An event in one of the over 2000 apps on the Zapier platform can thus trigger a workflow that will post approvals and task lists to a Slack channel.
When you're designing your Zap and you get to the Action step, you can search for Wrangle:
Searching for Wrangle to power the Action step of your Zap.
Next, you'll be prompted to choose the "Start a Workflow" action:
Choosing Wrangle's Start a Workflow action.
Next, you'll need to choose an account. If you haven't yet connected your Wrangle account, click on "Connect a new Account" and provide the credentials listed on the Integrations page of Wrangle's App Home in Slack.
Choosing a Wrangle account to use in your Zap action.
From there, you'll need to choose which Wrangle workflow in your account you want this Zap to start. If you don't have any, you'll need to design a workflow first.
Here's what it looks like when you're choosing which workflow to use. Note: you'll see your workflows in the list, these are the ones we have in our account.
Picking a Workflow to start.
Once you've chosen a workflow, Zapier will show you more fields to fill out. These fields fall into two categories:
- Identifying the Slack User starting the workflow
Since Zapier is automating the initiation of the Workflow, you're essentially automating how a user normally starts the Workflow — by filling out the intake form in Slack. So, these data fields help Zapier do that on a user's behalf.
If your Wrangle workflow has an "Upload files" question in the intake form, you will not see it in the list of workflows you can start via Zapier.
Every workflow in Wrangle is started by one of the users in your Slack Workspace. Wrangle needs to know who is starting the workflow, even if Zapier is triggering it, so that we know whom to notify as steps are completed. For example, in a workflow to report facility issues, we need to know who is having the facility problem so that they can be notified when the issue is resolved.
If you or a colleague are the person that needs to be the person starting the workflow every time Zapier kicks it off, then you can find your Slack User ID on the Integrations page. Copy and paste it into the "Slack User ID of person starting this workflow" field of your Zap.
More likely, you need to change who is starting the Wrangle workflow (and will thus be notified about progress) each time. For example, if you're trigger a sales manager approval whenever a deal reaches a certain stage in Salesforce, you want the specific sales rep for that deal to be the one who is notified when the workflow is completed.
Using data from your Trigger step (e.g. Salesforce in the previous example), we can use the Slack integration for Zapier to look up the Slack User ID of that person. You can use their name or email address in that Slack step to find their Slack User ID.
Once you've filled in the Slack ID of the person starting the flow, you can now move on to providing data for each of the intake form fields. These will be listed after the "user starting this workflow" field:
The full list of fields for starting our workflow.
Like the screenshot above, you'll see the "Workflow" field and the "Slack User ID of user starting this Workflow", but you'll see different fields after that since you have a different workflow intake form than ours does. In our case, the "Employee Name", "Manager", "Start Date", "Offer Location", and "Department" fields are from our intake form.
When you click into each of these fields, Zapier will give you a drop-down menu that lets you use data from previous steps in your Zap to populate this field dynamically:
Inserting data from previous Zap steps.
In the example above, our trigger is when a new message is posted to a channel in Slack, so we get a bunch of Slack-specific data like what the channel's name was. In your Zap, your drop-down will have data specific to your trigger.
Zapier doesn't show all of the data you can insert by default. Click on the "Show all options" button (you can see it in the screenshot above) and you will have access to the many data points from your previous Zap steps.
When you're starting a Wrangle workflow via Zapier, you'll need to know the Slack User ID of the person kicking off the flow. Thankfully, you can use Slack's Zapier integration to find their ID.
First, insert a step between your Trigger and your Action (the Action is the step where you're starting the Wrangle workflow). Choose Slack as the app you want to use at this new middle step:
Inserting a Slack step in between the Trigger and the Action steps.
In this Slack step, under Action Event, you'll want to scroll to the bottom until you can see the "Search" category:
Choose one of the "Search" options.
You'll want to pick one of the "Find User" options, most likely either "by Name" or "by Email". That way, you can use the name or email of the user provided by your Trigger step to find their Slack User ID.
When you test out the step, you'll get back lots of data from that user's Slack profile. But, we only need the ID field:
Testing out a "Find User in Slack" step so we can find the ID of the person who will be starting our workflow.
Now that we've got our Slack step working, we can go on to our Wrangle action step and insert the ID into the "Slack User ID of user starting the workflow" field:
Back on our Wrangle action, we can now insert the ID from our "Find User in Slack" step.
The Slack User ID will always look like uppercase letters, starting with a U or a W. They are not the same as the Slack username, which is what you sometimes use to @-mention them in Slack.
When you're using Wrangle as a Trigger, Wrangle provides data that might include a Slack User ID:
- You'll see a "Requester" field — that lists who started this workflow instance, including both their name and Slack User ID.
- If your intake form has fields to pick a user, the "Form Data" returned by the Wrangle trigger in Zapier will have the ID(s) of any users chosen in the form.
If you want more context on those users beyond their Slack User IDs, like their name or email address, you can use Slack's integration with Zapier to find that data.
To get started, go view your Zap in Zapier's designer. You'll want to add a Slack step after your Wrangle trigger, like this:
Adding a Slack step after our Wrangle trigger step.
When choosing which action to use on the Slack step, scroll to the bottom to find the "Search" section. You'll then want to pick "Find User by ID" since we have the ID from our Wrangle step.
Once you've chosen "Find User by ID", you'll have a field to put in the ID. Here's what it looks like when you click on that field:
Clicking on the ID field brings up data from previous steps.
You'll likely not see the Requester ID in those top 3 results from our "Workflow Completed in Wrangle" step. Click on Show all options. This will expand the list and you can find "Requester Slack User ID". Click on it to insert it into the field:
Insert the "Requester Slack User ID" data from your Wrangle step.
Now test this Slack step and you'll see all the information Slack knows about this person, including their name and possibly their email address:
Getting results after searching Slack for a user's ID.
Now, you can use the results of this Slack data about the user in subsequent steps in your Zap. For example, you could log their email address along with the data from Wrangle's intake form in a Google Sheet.