We are thrilled to announce that Ricoh360 Tours is now integrated with the Zapier Marketplace! This new integration offers a multitude of possibilities to automate and optimize your workflow. In this article, we will explain in detail the benefits of this connection with Zapier and provide concrete examples of use cases.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation platform that allows you to connect two or more software or tools. With a catalog of over 5000 software and SaaS platforms, you can make these tools communicate by creating "Zaps". Depending on the complexity of the automated processes and their frequency, you may need to subscribe to a paid subscription on Zapier. For more information, we invite you to visit their site.

Why did we decide to integrate into the Zapier ecosystem?

Our goal is to allow our users to integrate Ricoh360 into their work ecosystem. The virtual tour is an important tool for showcasing your real estate portfolio, but it is above all a tool that must integrate into your daily life so that you can get the most out of it. By connecting to Zapier, we open Ricoh360 Tours to a whole series of concrete use cases that you can implement to save time, better manage and analyze your content production, or even ensure much more efficient information sharing within your team.

Use Cases of Ricoh360 Tours with Zapier

CASE 1: Slack or Mail Notification

Generate a notification (Slack message or Email) every time a new virtual tour is created on your team. Making a virtual tour is good, but making sure it is broadcast to all your colleagues ensures maximum use and therefore productivity gains within your organization.

Here are the steps to create the Zap:

1. Choose the Ricoh360 Tours application:
   • Connect the application to your team using the API key that you can retrieve from your customer area.
2. Define the trigger event:
   • Choose "New Tour" as the event. This means that every time a new tour is created in Ricoh360 Tours, it will trigger the Zap.
3. Choose the Gmail application:
   • You can choose another email application if you wish, but in this example, we use Gmail.
   • Connect the mailbox that will be used to send the emails.
4. Define the action event:
   • Choose "Send Email" as the action event. This means that every time the Zap is triggered, an email will be sent.
5. Configure the email template:
   • You can customize the subject and body of the email as you wish. Here is an example of a template you can use:
     • Subject: "New Tour - Tag Name"
     • Body: "A new tour is online on your TEAM ID team. Here are the URLs: Full link: **https://view.ricoh360.com/TOURD** Compact link: **https://view.ricoh360.com/TOURID?type=compact** Best regards,"

And there you have it, you have created your Zap! Each time a new tour is created in Ricoh360 Tours, an email will automatically be sent to the address you have configured.

CASE 2: Real-time tracking and analysis of your virtual tour production

Automatically feed a Google Sheet every time a virtual tour is created on your team. You will thus have a file tracing all your creations, which could be useful especially if you want todo reporting. If you have several teams activated on Ricoh360, this will allow you to centralize production data on a single file.

Here are the steps to create the Zap:

1. Choose the Ricoh360 Tours application:
   • Connect the application to your team using the API key that you can retrieve from your customer area.
2. Define the trigger event:
   • Choose "New Tour" as the event. This means that every time a new tour is created in Ricoh360 Tours, it will trigger the Zap.
3. Choose the Google Sheets application:
   • You will need to set up the Google Sheets application and choose in which Google Sheets you want the Tour creation data to be recorded.
4. Define the action event:
   • Choose "Create Spreadsheet Row" as the action event. This means that each time a Tour is created, a new line will be added to your Google Sheets.
5. Link the Ricoh360 Tours tags to your Google Sheets:
   • You will need to choose the tags (information) that you want to record on the Google Sheets and link them to a column on your Google Sheets. So be sure to create the different columns on your Google Sheets in advance so that they are available to be attached to the Ricoh360 tags.
   • The list of available tags for export will appear. You can export the tour name, address, user email, creation date, etc.

And there you have it, you have created your Zap! Each time a new tour is created in Ricoh360 Tours, a new line will automatically be added to your Google Sheets with the information you have chosen.

CASE 3: Mass creation of tours from a Google Sheets

If you have a large number of tours to perform in one day, you can optimize your time by using a Zapier integration with Google Sheets. Here's how it could work:

1. Prepare your Google Sheets: Create a dedicated Google Sheets where you will enter all the necessary information for each tour. Each line will represent a separate tour and each column will represent a specific tour information (for example, the tour name, address, user email, creation date, etc.).
2. Configure your Zap: In Zapier, create a new Zap that triggers an action each time a new line is added to your Google Sheets.
3. Choose the Ricoh360 Tours application: Connect the application to your team using the API key that you can retrieve from your customer area.
4. Define the action event: Choose "Create Tour" as the action event. This means that each time a new line is added to your Google Sheets, a new tour will automatically be created in Ricoh360 Tours.
5. Link the columns of your Google Sheets to the Ricoh360 Tours tags: You will need to choose the columns of your Google Sheets that correspond to each Ricoh360 Tours tag. For example, if you have a column for the tour name in your Google Sheets, you will need to link it to the "tour name" tag in Ricoh360 Tours.

And there you have it, you have created your Zap! Each time you add a new line to your Google Sheets, a new tour will automatically be created in Ricoh360 Tours with the information you have provided. This allows you to create tours in bulk without having to manually enter them one by one in Ricoh360 Tours.

Now that you understand the logic of creating a simple Zap, you can let your imagination run wild to design Zaps that will perfectly integrate with your needs and business processes. To give you some ideas, here are some other possible scenarios:

• Case 4: Broadcasting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Choose to automatically post when youcreate a virtual tour. However, be careful with this use case to properly set the time of publication. Don't hesitate to put a delay between the creation of a tour and the publication to make sure you've had the necessary time to finalize your Tour.

• Case 5: Integration with Trello: With each creation of a new tour, a new card could automatically be added to a specific Trello board. This could be useful for teams that use Trello to manage their projects and want to have a visual trace of each new tour.
• Case 6: Integration with Mailchimp: With each creation of a new tour, an email could automatically be sent to a specific mailing list via Mailchimp. This could be useful for businesses that want to inform their customers or subscribers of each new tour.

Conclusion

The shared use cases are by no means exhaustive. A multitude of other use cases are possible. In fact, the limitation of what you can do will generally depend on your expertise with the Zapier tool (some processes involving multiple applications may require some experience or a little time to set up) and the availability of your business applications on the Zapier marketplace. (With over 5000 connected tools, you shouldn't be too blocked ^^). We hope to have inspired you to explore the universe of possibilities and our support team remains available to guide you as needed (although we will not be able to create the automations for you).