Auto-capture tool & process updates from Slack in a centralized changelog
Auto-capture tool & process updates from Slack in a centralized changelog
User research customer interview signup
Make it easy for stakeholders to join customer calls, without user researchers needing to co-ordinate or manually assist.
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Overview
Created by: Jeff Bertrand, Sr. UX Researcher @ Zapier
Customer interviews provide invaluable insights, but coordinating session attendees can quickly become a logistical nightmare. Research teams often spend hours sending Slack messages, coordinating who is joining what, and manually updating calendar invites just to get the right people in the room.
With this cross-team customer interview signup template, you can transform this cumbersome process into a hands-off system, where stakeholders opt-in to interviews with just a click, and user researchers can focus on facilitating, not coordinating. When customer interviews are scheduled, they automatically appear in a centralized Zapier Table — a database that lets you track and automate your data. Team members across your organization can browse upcoming sessions and add themselves as attendees without any coordination from your research team. Calendar events update automatically, attendance stays organized, and researchers can focus on conducting great interviews instead of managing invites.
Why build an automated interview signup system?
- Eliminate hours of coordination through Slack messages, emails, and manual calendar updates.
- Create a self-service experience where stakeholders can join interviews that fit their schedule and interests.
- Make customer research more accessible to product, design, engineering, marketing, and leadership teams.
What key features come with the Cross-team Customer Interview Signup template?
- Automatic event syncing — Newly scheduled customer interviews in your Google Calendar are instantly captured and displayed in a Zapier Table, creating a central hub for all upcoming research sessions.
- Self-serve attendee management — Stakeholders select their name from a dropdown in the Table to join an interview, eliminating the need for manual coordination through messages or emails.
- Multi-stakeholder support — Accommodates multiple team members joining the same customer interview, perfect for cross-functional collaboration across departments.
- Automatic calendar updates — When stakeholders add themselves to an interview, the Google Calendar event updates automatically to include them as an attendee, keeping everything synchronized without manual effort.
- Interview overview dashboard — Provides a complete view of all upcoming customer interviews, making it easy for team members to find and join sessions relevant to their work.
Who should use this template?
A self-service interview signup system is perfect for:
- User researchers → Eliminate the administrative burden of coordinating interview attendance, allowing more time to focus on conducting and analyzing research.
- Product managers → Easily join customer conversations relevant to your product area without waiting for invite approvals or managing calendar conflicts.
- Designers → Gain direct exposure to customer feedback and pain points by seamlessly participating in interviews that inform your design decisions.
- Marketing teams → Join customer conversations to better understand user language, challenges, and stories that can improve your messaging and positioning.
- Engineering leaders → Connect your team with real user feedback by making it simple to attend interviews related to features you're building.
How does this template work?
This template builds you a streamlined, self-service system for managing attendance at customer interviews. Here's how:
- When a new customer interview is scheduled in a shared Google Calendar, the Zap — an automated workflow — activates and extracts key information like interview time, customer name, meeting link, and discussion topic.
- This information automatically populates a Zapier Table, creating a centralized dashboard of all upcoming customer interviews that's accessible to your entire organization.
- Team members browse the Table to find relevant interviews, select sessions they want to join, and choose their name from a dropdown menu.
- When a stakeholder signs up, the template automatically updates the Google Calendar event to add them as an attendee, and they receive the calendar invitation directly with all meeting details.
- The system maintains a record of who has joined which interviews, providing visibility into cross-functional participation and helping research teams track engagement across departments.
With this system, you’ll eliminate coordination bottlenecks and make it easy for anyone in your organization to get time with your customers without creating additional work for your research team. The template is also fully customizable — you can add filters for interview types or customer segments, customize notification workflows, support multiple research calendars for different teams, or modify the signup form to collect additional information.
Customer research is most valuable when insights reach across your organization. By automating the interview signup process, you remove barriers to participation and create more opportunities for direct customer contact—which is extra important because the team that’s closest to the customer wins!
The result? Higher participation rates, better cross-functional alignment, and a dramatically lighter administrative load on your research team. This template uses customer research automation to help you bring customers to the center of your organization, so insights can flow freely to the teams that need them most.
Frequently asked questions
Can we track which teams are participating in customer research?
Absolutely. The template maintains a record of all signups, which you can filter and analyze to see participation patterns across departments, helping research teams identify engagement gaps or opportunities.
Can this template work with scheduling tools like Calendly or SavvyCal?
Yes! As long as your scheduling tool integrates with Google Calendar, this template will work seamlessly. When interviews are added to your designated Google Calendar, the automation activates regardless of how the appointment was initially scheduled.
What if someone needs to cancel their attendance?
The template handles cancellations just as easily as signups. When someone removes themselves from an interview in the Zapier Table, the Zap automatically updates the calendar event to remove them as an attendee.
Do I need technical skills to set up this template?
No technical skills are required. The template uses Zapier's user-friendly interface to connect your existing tools. You'll just need to know which form IDs correspond to which marketing assets, and have access to your CRM and notification systems.
