Trigger Feedback Requests In Real-Time

Overview

In more and more industries, customers and employees demand immediate action. An organization’s ability to field and respond to in-the-moment feedback can make the difference between a five-star experience and a lost customer or employee.

The Medallia Data Import API and Custom Import API enable you to provide data to Medallia Experience Cloud, using Medallia’s data transformation (ETL) layer to perform the heavy lifting. It can turn a POST from an operational system into a request for feedback in seconds.

Example Use Case

• When a customer returns a vehicle, a car rental agency sends them a post-return survey via SMS before the customer leaves the lot.

APIs Used

• Data Import
• Custom Import

📘

Data Import API from Medallia’s Retail Store: Online App

The below example leverages a Data Import API from Medallia’s Retail Store: Online App. This Data Import API is configured to import customer transactions in JSON format.

Depending on your use case and Apps installed, you may have different, pre-created APIs or create your own. You can go to the Install Apps page in Admin Suite to see what apps you currently have on your instance or the Medallia Xchange to explore new apps.

Approach

The rental agency’s point-of-sale system makes an OAuth-secured POST call to Medallia’s Data Import API, targeting the /inbound/v1/active_retail_store_invitation endpoint to invoke the client’s defined invitation process.

The incoming payload includes the customer’s contact data and recent rental transaction data and is processed through Medallia’s configured ETL layer. Sampling business logic is applied.

Experience Cloud delivers a survey invitation to the customer via email and/or SMS within a few minutes of the triggering transaction.

POST /inbound/v1/active_retail_store_invitation HTTP/1.1
Host: example.apis.medallia.com
Authentication: Bearer ${TOKEN}
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: application/json

[
  {
    "TRANSACTION_DATETIME": "2013-06-11 12:00:00",
    "TRANSACTION_ID": "119938", 
    "FIRST_NAME": "Scott", 
    "LAST_NAME": "Smith", 
    "EMAIL_ADDRESS": "[email protected]", 
    "PHONE_NUMBER": "555-555-5555", 
    "STORE_NUMBER": "US-1544"
  }
]

HTTP/1.1 200 Ok
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "records":1,
  "duplicates":0,
  "rejects":0
}

Variations

The example use case discussed above focused on a near-real-time experience for the customer. When timeliness is less important, such as surveying happiness with a purchased product after two weeks of use, or asking for feedback about an ongoing B2B relationship, Data Imports, and Custom Imports data can be uploaded to Experience Cloud via bulk file transfer mechanisms such as SFTP or S3.

Conclusion

Import APIs are incredibly flexible, used for ingesting data from transactions to reviews to cases and more. Its real-time nature makes it an ideal candidate for triggering timely feedback requests. If your CRM, point-of-sale, ticketing, HRM, or other business systems can support an HTTP POST, they are likely compatible with the Medallia Import APIs.