Save important responses to the contact or as downloadable results

Neelke Stadler Updated by Neelke Stadler

Personalisation is key when you chat to people. The more personal the experience is on your chat service, the more impact it will have.

You want to save some responses from users so that you can use it in future conversations. Stacks allow you to do that.

Remember, every message has individual settings. The Actions section allow you to act on important responses. Currently you can do 2 things with important responses.

1. Save responses to the contact profile

Contact profile fields are useful in various ways:

  • It is viewable by helpdesk operators in the Turn user interface. This means that if information obtained during a conversation is stored, helpdesk operators can see that context when they interact with people.
  • It can be used as triggers when setting up automation.
  • It can be used to personalise message copy, e.g. @name
  • It is used to define groups that will get specific Reminders

All of this is to say, you would want to save certain responses in stacks. Let's say during onboarding you ask a user what subject they teach. Once they respond to your question you can save their answer to their contact profile so that it is available for future purposes.

2. Save responses as downloadable results

Stacks allow you to build complex chat journeys with your users. Not all of your user interactions will be important to save, however, at times you want to save responses so that you can learn from them.

  • In a code stack you need to use the write_result() function to capture specific responses and store them for analysis.
  • On the no-code canvas you need to use the write result action to do this.

In both code and canvas stacks, you can download these important interactions as CSV files using the new Export Data button. The export will contain all the stored interactions per user.

How do you save a response?

Although the Update contact and Write results actions do different things, you save responses in the same way.

Responses from the following message types are saveable:

  • Text questions
  • Reply buttons; and/or
  • List messages

Steps to save responses:

Let's image a case where you are using text question to ask a person what their name is and you want to save their selection:

  • Click on the text question card so that the settings panel shows on the right-hand side.
  • Go to the Actions sections and click + to expand the Update contact and/or the Write results.
  • From the dropdown, select the contact profile field you want to save the information to. Remember, the contact field you want to save to should already exist. If not, you need to create it first.
    In the image below you can see that we are saving the User's Response to the question in the Name contact field.
Both 'Update contact' and 'Write results' will only collect data once they are explicitly set up. If you are used to Thread Data Exports, it is important to remember that only the stack interactions that are explicitly stored with the write_result() function/action will be downloadable.

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