I thought I was so smart when I set this up! And then it backfired horribly…
For the last couple years on the Virtual Assistant Assistant site, I’ve had a little survey tool that people could fill out and get personalized recommendations.
Each time someone completes the form, which I set up for free using Google Docs, I get an email.
Then I’d manually email them my recommendations. My process has improved over time, but was still manual.
At first, I manually wrote out the messages individually, until I’d covered each combination of answers.
After that, I’d just search my inbox for a survey response with the same answers, and copy and paste.
But searching the inbox each time was kind of a pain so I created a template file I could refer back to and copy and paste the template response each time.
But pulling up the template file grew tiresome, so I created a series of keyboard shortcuts using the Auto Text Expander plugin for Chrome.
And that’s really how I would do it. People would even give me a hard time (and rightfully so) that I didn’t have a virtual assistant on this low-level task.
A little ironic, right?
Well, a couple weeks ago I tried to get smart and figure out a way to automate and outsource this task.
Since each survey response comes in with the subject line, “New Virtual Assistant Survey Submitted”, I set up an If This Then That “recipe” to send an email to Fancy Hands each time a new message with that matching subject line hit my inbox.
Each Fancy Hands email was a new task request to their virtual assistants.
Inside the IFTTT recipe, I gave instructions for the task. I included a link to the “answer key” file in Google Docs, and asked the virtual assistant service to email the survey respondent on my behalf (cc-ing me), with the appropriate template.
What I forgot was that Fancy Hands sends a confirmation email that they received your task, using the same subject line as what you sent them.
When that confirmation message hit my inbox, because it matched the IFTTT recipe words “New Virtual Assistant Survey Submitted”, it triggered another task request email.
Which triggered another confirmation message.
Which triggered another task request.
Which triggered another confirmation message.
And on and on and on, more than 50 requests in total before I got back to my computer and could figure out what happened.
(Thankfully they refunded all those nonsense tasks.)
My fix was to disable the Fancy Hands auto-confirmation emails, and am working on tightening up my IFTTT recipe to make sure it works as intended.
Turns out, I also could have changed the subject-line in IFTTT.
I have high hopes that this automation/outsourcing combo will ultimately save some time and maybe even start a few conversations.
What do you use If This Then That for?
I know I’m barely scratching the surface of it’s automation power, but I’m eager to dive deeper into it. Definitely open to hear about any cool recipe suggestions you have, or if you like the more business-oriented Zapier more.
Let me know in the comments below!