Using Slack and Google Sheets to Manage Survey Submissions

Hello folks 👋

Lately, I've been fiddling with automation to improve certain processes in my job. Since Slack plays a pivotal role in our company's communication, it also plays a key role in the automations I build. Now, I'm no technical mastermind so what I build tends to be pretty simple. Still, I thought I would share what I've got in case it proves helpful to someone else in the community.

📚 Context

Recently, we sent out a survey to our customers. Several teams were involved in this process since the feedback we were looking for was relevant to all of them. Our goal was to monitor new submissions and:

• Send a daily reminder to check new feedback to a dedicated Slack channel.
• Include a list of respondent emails in the Slack reminder for potential follow-ups.

🧰 Toolbox

The services used:

• Slack
• Google Sheets
• Make.com

💡 Solution

I built this with Make.com, the automation platform I work with. For the benefit of the community, I replicated the use case with some testing data.

• Sheet with submissions

Here's a sample sheet representing the feedback survey.

• Daily automation

The automation checks the sheet daily at a specific time. If there's new feedback, it sends a message to a Slack channel, notifying the team about the new submissions.

• Recreating the setup

This is my setup of the Google Sheets part of the automation. Essentially, you need to select the sheet you want to monitor and set the maximum number of results for each run. In my case, I chose 100, corresponding to the total number of users we reached out to.

Well, and this is the setup of the Slack part that sends the automated message. Here you choose where you want to post the message and create the body of the message. You can check out the look of the final message below to see what the example in the 'Text' field translates to.

Finally, I'd like to talk a bit about the 'text aggregator' part. It sounds a tad complex but don't worry, it really isn't. Its purpose is to ensure that only one Slack message is sent for all submissions. If I did not include it in the automation and e.g. 10 submissions came through, we would receive 10 notification messages.

Anyway, here's a bit of info related to the text aggregator setup. Please note that you need to enable the 'Show advanced settings' option.

We wanted to include a tidy list of email addresses of the respondents in the Slack messages. For the list to be neat, I chose the 'new row' separator. This choice organizes all email addresses beneath one another.

In the 'text' field, you simply input the info you want to extract from the Google Sheet. In our case, it was the users' email addresses. 

• The final Slack message

And here's the result! If there are new submissions, this message is posted in a relevant channel. It includes a link to the Google Sheet for quick access and a list of contacts.

👇 If you find this helpful, I am attaching a blueprint of the automation. If you want to give it a spin, you can simply import it into Make and adjust it to your needs.

For those looking for something simpler, there's a pre-made template that monitors new info in a sheet and sends it in a Slack message. You can check it out here: Share data added to a Google Sheet as Slack messages.

Alrighty, that's enough from me today.

⏳ I will pop back to share how we managed to automate two more processes related to this customer survey.

1. Sending responses to optional survey questions to a dedicated sheet and notifying a specific team that needs to work with this type of feedback shared.
2. Sending 'thank you for sharing your thoughts' emails and notifying relevant team members on Slack if a customer expresses willingness to provide more feedback in person.

Have a good one, everyone 🌟