In order to send surveys and gather Customer Experience feedback, first, we must build a bridge that gets your Contacts into AskNicely.
CSV Importer: Using a spreadsheet to import your contacts
This method is the quickest - and arguably most flexible - way to get started with AskNicely. You can be sending surveys in 20 minutes if you are able to build a spreadsheet of the contacts you wish to survey.
Our CSV Importer help article walks through the import process in depth; once your contacts are imported, set up a Send Scheduler and you're laughing!
3rd Party Integration: Automated contact importing from your CRM
3rd Party Integrations are connections that were built in partnership with other CRMs. We have varying degrees of flexibility when it comes to how these are configured - some are very flexible and can be configured in many ways (Zendesk) while others are a bit more static and "are the way they are." (Shopify)
When it comes to how surveys are sent, and the types of data that they will bring into AskNicely. The first step when setting up your integration should be to find your integration in our list of 3rd Party Integrations and follow the steps within. They should walk you through a fairly comprehensive setup process. Some integrations actually send surveys; some just import contacts. The help docs should be clear on this - let us know if not.
Maybe the best thing about 3rd Party Integrations with AskNicely is that they are typically a "one and done" process - once they're configured, they will just do their thing, no further fussing needed. Our Support Team is here if you need help with any particular step so feel free to reach out via the chat window in the lower right hand corner of askNicely if you need an assist.
API: Build an automated connection and reap the benefits
This requires a lift with your Developer team, but yields the most flexibility and automation abilities once configured.
Documentation for how to set up the API can be found by clicking Settings > API in AskNicely. The dream here is that you can take advantage of each and every bit of a data AskNicely sends or captures with an API connection; the catch is that you have to build it, as we do not know your systems and can only advise based on our experience with working with other sites.
The advice we give for setting up the API is to read the documentation, experiment, and test-test-test-test. The two typical approaches are setting up AskNicely to sync a large list of contacts every night with the "Bulk Add/Send" call which then uses the Global Contact Rule to determine if someone should be surveyed or not, or to just send one-off triggered emails with the "Send Survey" API call.
You can use one or more of these approaches - just know that with added data sources comes added complexity, so if things get tricky, feel free to reach out to our Support Team (support@asknice.ly) for help.