Customer onboarding is your first, best chance to make a great impression. A smooth, welcoming experience can turn a new user into a lifelong advocate. But a clunky, manual, or error-prone process can lead to frustration and early churn. The secret to a world-class onboarding experience isn't more manual effort; it's smarter automation.
What if you could break down your entire onboarding process into a series of simple, reusable, and reliable tasks, each triggered by a single API call?
Welcome to the world of agentic workflows. With a task execution engine like actions.do, you can transform your complex business processes into a sequence of discrete, manageable "Actions." This guide will walk you through how to automate your customer onboarding from start to finish using this powerful, API-first approach.
Traditionally, automating a process like customer onboarding meant writing a long, complicated script or relying on a rigid, all-in-one platform.
There's a better way.
The core philosophy of actions.do is to unbundle monolithic workflows into their fundamental components. We call these components Actions.
An Action is a single, self-contained, executable step within a larger business workflow.
Actions are the building blocks; a Workflow is the complete process you build by orchestrating those blocks. By defining each business operation as a standalone Action, you gain immense flexibility, reusability, and clarity.
Let's build a robust customer onboarding workflow piece by piece. Imagine a new user just signed up for your service. Our goal is to automatically perform the following three tasks.
First, we identify the discrete tasks in our process. For a standard SaaS onboarding, these might be:
In actions.do, each of these becomes a separate, callable API endpoint.
Once a user signs up, your main application can make a simple API call to trigger the send-welcome-email action. You just need to pass the necessary data, like the customer's email and name.
API Call:
POST https://api.actions.do/v1/execute/action-send-welcome-email
Payload:
{
"customerEmail": "jane.doe@example.com",
"customerName": "Jane Doe",
"orderId": "ORD-98765"
}
The actions.do engine receives this request, executes your predefined logic for sending an email (e.g., using SendGrid or AWS SES), and returns a confirmation. The execution record provides a complete audit trail of what happened.
Execution Result:
{
"executionId": "exec-1a2b3c4d-5e6f-7g8h-9i0j",
"actionId": "action-send-welcome-email",
"workflowId": "wf-customer-onboarding-v2",
"status": "succeeded",
"startedAt": "2023-10-27T10:00:05Z",
"completedAt": "2023-10-27T10:00:07Z",
"input": {
"customerEmail": "jane.doe@example.com",
"orderId": "ORD-98765"
},
"output": {
"success": true,
"messageId": "msg_a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8"
}
}
Now that you have your building blocks, you can orchestrate them from your application's backend. When a new user signs up, your code simply makes a series of API calls.
// Pseudo-code in your application after a successful user signup
const userData = {
email: 'jane.doe@example.com',
name: 'Jane Doe',
company: 'Acme Inc.'
};
async function runOnboardingWorkflow(user) {
try {
// Call actions in sequence or in parallel
await triggerAction('create-crm-contact', { user });
await triggerAction('send-welcome-email', { user });
await triggerAction('provision-user-account', { user });
console.log('Onboarding workflow completed successfully for', user.email);
} catch (error) {
console.error('Onboarding workflow failed:', error);
// You can trigger another Action here to alert your team!
await triggerAction('alert-team-on-slack', { error });
}
}
// Function to call the actions.do API
async function triggerAction(actionId, payload) {
// Logic to make a POST request to api.actions.do
console.log(`Triggering action: ${actionId}`);
// ...fetch API call...
}
runOnboardingWorkflow(userData);
This approach is incredibly powerful. You control the logic. Need to add a 1-minute delay between creating the CRM contact and sending the email? Easy. Need to add a new step to notify your sales team on Slack? Just define a new notify-sales-on-slack Action and add another API call.
By defining your business operations as API-driven Actions, you are embracing Business-as-Code. This means your workflows gain the same benefits as your application source code:
Manual, error-prone onboarding is a thing of the past. By breaking your workflows down into a series of simple API calls with actions.do, you can build automated services that are robust, scalable, and easy to manage. You get the power of automation with the flexibility of code.
Ready to automate your first workflow? Visit actions.do to define, manage, and execute the individual tasks that power your business.