Has anyone figured out how to use Zapier’s API Request feature to create Follow Up Boss contacts that automatically start Action Plans?
I’m connecting my dialer system to FUB through Zapier. When someone gets called, I want to both add them as a contact AND kick off a specific Action Plan right away.
The regular FUB integration in Zapier specifically mentions it won’t trigger Action Plans automatically. Support told me to try the API Request step instead.
Before I spend hours figuring this out, wondering if someone already cracked this code? Any working API calls or specific endpoints you used would be super helpful.
Had this exact workflow nightmare at my company. Yeah, the two-step API approach works, but it’s messy and unreliable.
Here’s the thing nobody mentions: Zapier’s API requests get flaky when you chain them. You’ll hit rate limits, random timeouts, and that delay hack is just asking for trouble.
I ditched Zapier for Latenode after weeks of fighting these limitations. Night and day difference.
Latenode lets you build the whole flow in one automation. Create the FUB contact, parse response, extract ID, fire the action plan trigger. No delays, no webhook formatting headaches. Just clean API calls that actually work.
You also get proper error handling when FUB’s API craps out. Way better than Zapier’s useless “something went wrong” messages.
Saved me 10+ hours of debugging vs the Zapier setup. The visual builder makes it dead simple to see what’s happening at each step.
Hit this exact problem 8 months ago. The sequential API setup works, but everyone’s missing a key piece - you’ve got to handle the async stuff right. FUB’s contact creation needs a few milliseconds to fully propagate before you can assign action plans. Don’t use arbitrary delays though. I built a retry mechanism in the second Zapier step instead. If the action plan assignment fails, it waits 2 seconds and tries again (up to 3 times). This fixed all the intermittent failures I was getting with fixed delays. Also heads up - some action plan templates need specific contact fields or the API call will silently fail if your dialer isn’t sending complete data.
Had this exact problem last year with our calling platform. Use Zapier’s webhook formatter to structure your API request right. After you POST the contact to FUB’s contacts endpoint, grab the contact ID and immediately make another API call to assign the action plan. The part that took me forever - you need the right headers. Make sure your auth token format is correct and you’re sending application/json content type. Also heads up: some action plans have prerequisites that’ll stop them from auto-starting even with the API call. Test with a simple action plan first before jumping into complex workflows.
Had the same problem about six months ago when I was setting up our lead routing. You can’t do it all in one call - you need a two-step approach. First, POST to /contacts and grab the contact ID from the response. Then hit /contacts/{contact_id}/action_plans with that ID. One thing that tripped me up: the action plan payload needs the template ID, not the name. You’ll have to GET /action_plans first to find it. This setup works great for our dialer integration. Way more control than regular Zapier, even though there’s a small delay between the calls.
yeah, i got this working but it’s pretty hacky. you need a zapier delay between creating the contact and hitting the action plan api - i set mine to 3 seconds. without it, fub gets confused and the action plan won’t start half the time. also make sure your action plan isn’t set to manual trigger only or it’ll block the api calls completely.