AskNicely allows you to combine existing contact data information into a new custom data field.
For example, you may want to combine “Canada,” “United States,” and “Mexico” into a group called “North America.” Or, you could use Custom Groups to group your Customer Success Managers by the supervisor they report to.
In a nutshell, creating a custom group creates a new data point that will be added to any applicable contacts on your Contacts page and again on any future responses from that contact.
This article outlines how to create individual custom groups. If you have a lot of data, you can also create custom groups by csv.
How Custom Groups Work
Custom Groups let you select data points to group together. You can use these to sort data in leaderboards, or filter, or even to pull in as custom data points. Let’s take a look at what this looks like. 
- Click the Cog Wheel to open your Settings.
- Click Data Management
- Choose Custom Groups
At the very top, you’ll see your Group Name (a). If you have multiple types of groups, their names will be lined up here. The group name is what will be used as a custom data field.
Below that, you’ll find each Group (b). This is the data you want to display when you look for the group. In our example here, we want this to be the supervisor’s name. If we were going by region, we might want the group to be the region name, like “North America”.
Clicking on a group will show you the items in the Edit Group modal (c). You can add or remove items from the group using the list. Any time one of these data points is present in someone’s contact data, the group will also be applied.
Please note: You cannot select data fields that are created through the Location Management app to create new Custom Groups - this may create an infinite loop and your data may not be properly updated.
If you make any changes, make sure to click Save.
Click Apply Changes to apply these new groups to your contacts. This will run through all of your contacts, and apply the new data point where applicable. This process can take a little while, depending on your contacts.
In our example, AskNicely will look through the contacts and whenever Jamie Lannister is the Customer Success Manager, AskNicely will add the data point “Supervisor,” with Matthew Berninger as the value. You can verify this on your Contact page when the process is complete.
Note: This process will apply the custom groups to your contact data immediately and going forward. It will not apply these data points retroactively to responses that you’ve already collected.
You can now use this data point just like any other data point. Use this to insert into text, to sort Leaderboards, and more!