Employee Experience Builder: Complete Guide

The Employee Experience Builder lets you create an automated sequence of messages, surveys, and shoutouts that runs in Slack. You choose a trigger, add timed steps, and CultureBot delivers them to the right people on schedule. This article covers every option available today, how it works with Surveys, and the behavior worth understanding before you build.

In this guide:

• How the Employee Experience Builder works

• How the Employee Experience Builder works with Surveys

• Five Experiences you can build quickly

• Troubleshooting

How the Employee Experience Builder Works

An Experience has two parts: a trigger that decides when someone is enrolled, and a series of steps that run after enrollment.

When a person meets the trigger condition, CultureBot enrolls them and begins the sequence. Each step is scheduled relative to the step before it. The sequence continues until the last step is delivered.

Experiences run in Slack. Microsoft Teams is not supported for Experiences today.

Choosing a Trigger

You select the trigger in the Basics step of the builder. There are four options.

When a user is first seen in Slack: CultureBot enrolls each person automatically the first time it sees their account in your workspace. This is the most common onboarding trigger because it requires no data entry and no admin action. The sequence begins the moment IT provisions the account.
When a user joins a specific channel: Joining the channel enrolls the person. This works well for cohort programs, employee resource groups, manager tracks, and training channels, because the channel itself becomes the enrollment mechanism. Adding someone to the channel is the only action required.
On an employee's start date: Start dates come from your HRIS (human resources information system) sync, a CSV import, or manual entry on the employee directory. Steps can be scheduled up to 7 days before someone starts and up to 180 days after their start date. This is the trigger to use for preboarding.
On a specific date and time: One calendar moment, delivered workspace-wide. Use this for all-hands meetings, open enrollment, launches, and company campaigns. This trigger can also be set to repeat on an interval of your choosing, so the same multi-step flow runs again without being rebuilt.

Three Automated Actions

Automate every step in an experience with one or more of these three actions. You can mix all three in a single experience.

Message: Send to an employee, a channel, a group of specific people, or via direct message to everyone in a channel. The employee's manager and buddies are also available as destinations, which is what makes preboarding and buddy programs possible.
1. Message options:
  
  - Add an @channel mention on channel posts
  
  - Choose the sender under Send As, so a message can come from CultureBot or be attributed to a specific person such as your CEO, HR lead, or the employee's manager
  
  - Rich composer with links, GIF and image support, plus @-mention autocomplete
Survey: Choose any survey form you have already built, then select the audience. Set responses to anonymous or attributed on a per-step basis. The survey step creates a real survey campaign linked back to the Experience, so results flow into standard Surveys reporting including response rates, per-question breakdowns, CSV export, and AI-generated summaries of open text answers. Audience options:

- The enrolled employee

- Their manager

- Their buddies

- Specific users

- Everyone in a channel
Shoutout: Posts a formatted recognition card to a channel using any of your configured shoutout types, such as values, kudos, or welcome. The sender and recipient are configurable, which allows patterns like a manager publicly welcoming a new hire on their first day. Note on shoutout senders: in an Experience triggered by a person (first seen, channel join, or start date), the sender is the employee's manager and the recipient is the enrolled employee. Free choice of both sender and recipient is available on date-triggered Experiences.

Controlling Timing

Each step is offset from the step before it. You can set offsets in:

• Hours

• Days

• Business days

Business day offsets skip weekends, so a day three check-in never lands on a Saturday.

On a start date experience, steps can run up to 7 days before someone starts and up to 180 days after.

Each step has its own time of day. You choose whether that time is interpreted in the admin's timezone or in the employee's local timezone. Local timezone delivery means a 9am message reaches someone in Berlin at 9am in Berlin and someone in Singapore at 9am in Singapore.

Personalization Tokens and Custom Variables

Any message or shoutout can pull live data from the employee record. Available tokens include:

{new_hire}, {recipient}, {first_name}, {last_name}, {full_name}, {manager}, {buddies}, {team}, {department}, {location}, {title}, {start_date}, {tenure}, {birthday}, {bio}, {skills}, {languages}, {interests}, {music}, {linkedin}, {personal_email}, {groups}, {profile_link}

You can also define custom variables on an individual Experience. Map a variable such as {it_lead} or {office_manager} to a specific person, and the same template will work across departments without rewriting the message content. This is the recommended approach when you need to route to a role beyond manager or buddy.

Manager and Buddy Routing

CultureBot stores a manager and a buddy assignment for each employee. These are managed in the Pairings manager in the admin portal, which is filterable and supports CSV export.

Because manager and buddy are first-class destinations for a step, you can build flows that reach the people around a new hire rather than only the new hire:

• The manager receives a prep checklist a week before their new person starts

• The buddy receives an introduction and a nudge to reach out on day two

• The manager receives a survey at day 30 about how ramp-up is tracking

Buddy pairings can be pre-assigned by work email before the person exists in Slack. The pairing links automatically once their account appears.

Building, Previewing, and Publishing

The builder is a three-step wizard: Basics, then the step builder, then Review. The Review screen includes a per-step preview showing the actual rendered message as the recipient will see it.

Managing live Experiences:

• Pause or resume any Experience without losing its definition. You can also delete an Experience you no longer need

• The admin list view shows the trigger, the step timeline, messages sent, and the last run time

• Each Experience keeps a full log of every message sent

• You can enable an optional alert to selected admins when a new person is enrolled, so someone can review enrollment

How the Employee Experience Builder Works with Surveys

There are two ways to run a survey in CultureBot, and they answer different questions.

A standalone survey campaign is for company-wide listening.

• Frequency: one-time, weekdays, recurring weekly, biweekly, or monthly presets, a custom interval in weeks, or automatically to new users on join or at 7, 30, 60, or 90 days after joining

• Audience: everyone, a channel, specific users, by department, by work location, or posted publicly in a channel

• Question types: short answer, long answer, number scale with custom minimum, maximum, and endpoint labels, single select, and multi select, with an optional link per question

• Anonymous or attributed responses, an optional reminder, and optional reward points for responding

• Results delivery after each response or after a set time, sent to all admins by direct message, to specific users, or to a channel

• Reporting includes a public results page, response rate and engagement scoring, per-question breakdowns, CSV export, and AI-generated summaries of open text

A survey step inside an Experience is for moment-based listening.

• The survey fires at a precise point in one person's journey, such as day five, the 30-day mark, or the week after an event

• It can be aimed at the employee, or at their manager or buddy about the employee

• Results land in the same Surveys reporting as standalone campaigns

Which to use: a standalone engagement survey tells you how the company feels this quarter. An Experience survey tells you whether one specific moment worked, asked of the people who just lived through it, while the memory is fresh. Running both lets you trace a dip in your quarterly numbers back to a specific moment.

Five Experiences You Can Build Quickly

Each of these takes about 15 minutes.

New hire welcome, three steps

Trigger: when a user is first seen in Slack

• Day 1: direct message to the new hire with their day one guide

• Day 1: shoutout to your general channel from their manager welcoming them to the team

• Day 5, business days: anonymous survey to the new hire asking how week one is going
Manager preboarding prep, two steps

Trigger: on the employee's start date

• 5 business days before start: message to the manager or HR team with a static checklist that reminds them to complete preboarding tasks (ex. order laptop, buddy assignment, and first-week calendar)

• 1 day before start: direct message to {buddies} letting them know the new hire starts tomorrow
30-day check-in with manager cross-check, two steps

Trigger: on the employee's start date

• Day 30: anonymous survey to the employee about support and role clarity

• Day 30: survey to {manager} about how ramp-up is tracking

This gives you two views of the same moment, comparable in one report.
Event flow, three steps

Trigger: on a specific date and time, set to repeat

• 3 days before: channel announcement

• 1 hour before: channel reminder

• 1 day after: anonymous feedback survey

Set the repeat interval and a monthly or quarterly all-hands reminder and survey runs continuously.
Cohort or program onboarding

Trigger: when a user joins a specific channel

• Welcome message on enrollment

• Resource drops on a cadence

• A pulse survey 30 days after joining

• A completion shoutout

Adding someone to the channel starts the program, so there is no separate admin step.

Troubleshooting

A step did not send

Check the message log for the Experience first. If the message was logged as delivered, the issue is on the recipient side. If it was not logged, confirm the person is still enrolled and that the Experience is not paused.

Someone was not enrolled

For first-seen triggers, confirm the person's account is visible to CultureBot in your Slack workspace. For start-date triggers, confirm the start date is populated on their employee record. For channel-join triggers, confirm they joined the specific channel named in the trigger.

A pre-start message failed to reach a new hire

Steps scheduled before a start date cannot direct message the employee, because their account may not exist yet. Reroute that step to the manager, the HR team, the buddy, or a channel.

Enrollments disappeared after an edit

Editing a live Experience can cancel in-flight enrollments depending on what changed. Duplicate the Experience and test your changes on the copy before editing something that is actively running.

A token displayed as blank

Tokens pull from the employee record. If a field such as {department} or {title} is empty on the record, the token renders blank. Check the Employee Directory and confirm the field is populated, or use a custom variable instead.

A manager or buddy step did not route

Confirm the assignment exists in the Pairings manager. Buddy pairings assigned by work email link automatically once the account appears, so a pairing created before the person joined may still be pending.

Still have questions? Email support@getculturebot.com and our team will help you map your first experience.