Use Confirmit Flex to call out to other services from Confirmit surveys
posted by: Nick Roman on 7/13/2010
In a previous blog post I discussed how Confirmit Flex enables you to reach out to respondents through new channels. Recently we launched SMS as a new, fully integrated data collection mode, also built on top of the "Survey Front End" extension point in Confirmit Flex, which I discussed in that blog post. The extension points are the "hooks" in Confirmit that allow external applications to extend the Confirmit platform. The Survey Front End extension points provide an API to the Confirmit Survey Engine, enabling fully integrated data collection on channels other than those built into Confirmit. With the launch of the SMS Surveys extension, Confirmit surveys can now be run via SMS messages in parallel to the other channels, authored in the ordinary way, and stored real-time in the survey database.
The SMS extension also has an interface to another extension point: the "Scripting" extension point. This extension point allows survey designers to add scripts to their surveys that call out to external services. With the SMS extension you can use this to trigger off an SMS directly from a survey.
I can think of at least 2 very useful applications of such script calls from Confirmit surveys to the SMS extension:
1. Alerts: You can send an SMS to someone (customer contact, manager etc.) based on a particular event in the survey (someone asking for a follow-up, a particularly low satisfaction score etc.)
2. Identity Verification: For certain types of surveys, for example, panel registration surveys, you may want extra verification to be confident that there is an authentic person registering for your panel, and to avoid duplicate submissions. You could ask the respondents to provide their mobile phone number, generate a random pin code in a survey script, and send it via SMS by a script call to the SMS Extension. Then you could ask the respondent to type in the PIN code before they are allowed to complete their registration.
The Scripting extension point is useful for integrating with a range of external web services, either to perform some sort of lookup based on a respondent's answers (for example postcode lookup) or to trigger some sort of action based on a respondent's answers, as in the SMS example.
What do you think? Can you suggest other applications for script calls to the SMS extension?