Inquiry Form & Admin Tool: Automating the Connection

Here’s how we organised our system:

1. A user submits the contact form on our website (Trigger)
• Status: Success or Failure
• Input contents
↓
2. Automatically post to Slack (acts as a monitoring tool)
↓
3. Accumulate the submission contents in a Google Sheets spreadsheet (acts as a database)

At BOEL, we had already implemented steps 1 and 2 (form → Slack).
To accumulate the input data, we wanted to also implement form → Google Sheets (step 3), but faced several issues and progress was slow. After trial and error, we achieved our original goal by linking Slack (step 2) with Google Sheets (step 3).

Because the method of linking the systems is introduced on many websites, this article focuses on key points and pain points encountered.

We use Slack as our communication tool.
If we are to manage whether a form submission succeeded or failed, it’s convenient to receive a notification in a tool we use daily. Therefore, when a submission is made on our website, we created a mechanism that automatically sends a notification to Slack.

The notification message is structured like this:

• (example image: Slack success notification)

• If there is a send-error, we set the beginning of the message like this: (example image: Slack failure notification) To detect submission failures early, we make a special address setting for failures and apply noticeable text formatting.
The notification to Slack is for “status management + log capture,” so we post the JSON input data from the website without further processing.

Implementation method on the site: We used Slack’s Incoming Webhook .At the time the form is submitted, the input content is POSTed to Slack.

To link Slack and Google Sheets, we used the Slack Event APIand triggered an event at the timing of a Slack notification.
We added additional settings to the Slack App that we configured in step 2.

We created a tool using Google Apps Script that takes the data received from Slack, processes it, and registers it into a management sheet. We used regular expressions to extract only the items we wanted and stored them in the table.
Here’s what our management sheet looks like: (image of the sheet)

If you like, I can also prepare a bilingual version (Japanese + English) of the article or a simplified summary for your team. Would you like me to proceed with that?