Customer onboarding is your first, best chance to make a lasting impression. A smooth, efficient process can turn a new user into a lifelong advocate. But a clunky, manual one—riddled with missed steps and delays—can lead to early churn. The problem? Traditional onboarding is often a series of manual checklists, prone to human error and difficult to scale.
What if you could define your entire onboarding process as code? What if you could transform that static checklist into a dynamic, intelligent service that runs itself?
This is the promise of Tasks.do, an agentic task management API that allows you to automate complex workflows by defining them programmatically. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through building a fully automated customer onboarding experience using the Tasks.do API.
Before we dive into the code, let's establish why automating this process is a game-changer:
By treating your operational processes as code, you create a system that is testable, versionable, and continuously improvable—just like your software.
Imagine a new user, Jane, just signed up for your product. A typical manual onboarding checklist might look like this:
Now, let's automate this entire flow using the Tasks.do agentic workflow.
Our automation begins the moment Jane's account is created in your database. Your application's backend will make a single API call to Tasks.do to kick off the entire onboarding project.
First, make sure you have the client installed:
npm install @do-sdk/client
Now, in your user creation service, you would add the following:
import { client } from '@do-sdk/client';
async function onUserSignedUp(user) {
const onboardingProject = await client.tasks.create({
title: `Onboard New Customer: ${user.name}`,
description: `Execute all onboarding steps for ${user.email}.`,
priority: 'high',
tags: ['onboarding', 'new-customer', `plan-${user.plan}`],
assignees: ['csm-bots@example.com'], // Assign to an automation queue
subtasks: [
{
title: 'Send Welcome Email',
description: `Trigger welcome email sequence for ${user.email}.`
},
{
title: 'Provision User Workspace',
description: `Create and configure workspace for user ID: ${user.id}.`
},
{
title: 'Assign Customer Success Manager',
dependencies: ['Provision User Workspace'] // Depends on the workspace existing
},
{
title: 'Schedule 7-Day Check-in Call',
dueDate: new Date(Date.now() + 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000).toISOString(),
dependencies: ['Assign Customer Success Manager'] // Must have a CSM assigned first
}
]
});
console.log(`Started onboarding project: ${onboardingProject.id}`);
}
With this single API call, we've defined and initiated the entire multi-step process. This is the core of task management as code.
Let's break down what we just created. We didn't just make a static to-do list; we created a set of intelligent, interconnected tasks that the Tasks.do agents will now manage.
Notice the subtasks array. Each object represents a step in our workflow. But the real power comes from the dependencies property.
This enforces the correct order of operations automatically, a key feature for any complex project management flow. Our platform ensures prerequisites are met before the next action is taken, eliminating race conditions and process errors.
The dueDate for the check-in call is calculated dynamically. The system won't just remind you; it will track this deadline and can escalate if it's missed. Assignees can be specific individuals, or as we've shown here, a service account or team queue (csm-bots@example.com). This allows you to build robust automations that aren't tied to a single person.
So, how does the "Send Welcome Email" task actually send an email? This is where the "agentic" nature of Tasks.do shines. Instead of just being a passive checklist, Tasks.do integrates with your other tools to execute work.
Using our API-first design, you can configure webhooks or use our SDK to have agents in your own infrastructure listen for task updates.
By connecting your existing tools to Tasks.do, you create a powerful, centralized orchestrator for all your automated tasks.
Let's recap what we've accomplished. We've taken a manual, error-prone customer onboarding checklist and transformed it into a fully automated, intelligent service. This workflow is:
This is the future of operations. By embracing a business as code mindset, you can build automations that are as robust and reliable as your core application software. Customer onboarding is just the beginning. Think of employee onboarding, lead qualification, bug triage, financial reporting—any process defined by a checklist can be turned into a powerful automated service.
Ready to turn your checklists into code? Explore the Tasks.do API and start building your first agentic workflow today.