This month Zapier announced their new Multi-Step Zaps. If you’re not already familiar with Zapier, it’s a handy automation platform which syncs apps (a process they call zaps), enabling them to talk to each other and thus perform actions without the need for programming. This could be as simple as a notification in Slack when your company’s name is mentioned on Twitter or an automated addition of PayPal customers emails to a mail chimp list when they make a purchase in your online store. The 5oo apps available across the spectrum of project management, ecommerce, customer relations and social media including Asana, Freshbooks, Buffer, GitHub and SugarSync
The latest announcement lets users chain as many Actions as desired to a single Trigger. You’re no longer limited to one-to-one connections. You can even mix-and-match data from multiple apps to pass all the essentials to a dedicated hub, like routing all customer information from emails and forms into your CRM or tracking spreadsheet.
With a workforce that has almost doubled to 36 in the last year, Zapier is a remote team of specialist staff working across the globe. I spoke to Danny Schreiber, Marketer at Zapier about the company’s new capabilities and the challenges that result. Zapier’s early days saw 50 apps available through their automation services. a number which has now grown to over 500. Danny admits that this has not been without its challenges especially if service goes down on a single app. “Now a third of our term are customer support and we employ 20 engineers to ensure that the service is reliable, easy to use and we’ll be there if something goes wrong”.
He admits that there’s a veritable wish list of apps that customers really want to app to Zapier, “Oracle, Excel and Microsoft dynamics, these integrations are more complex and require more testing and more quality assurance”. They also are hoping to enable team accounts for workplace departments in the new future as Danny notes “Hundreds of people are asking for this feature and we are working hard to make it happen”
For those wanting to crank it up a notch, Zapier has also enabled Code integration to let customers write simple code for tasking like formatting names and email addresses and converting date formats to be relevant to the requirements of different countries.
The future can only be bright for Zapier as Danny predicts “I think we’ll have more than 1000 apps by 2017”.
