Save important responses to the contact profile or as downloadable results

Raquel Updated by Raquel

Personalisation is key when you chat with 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 them in future conversations. Journeys allow you to do that.

Remember, every message has individual settings. The Actions section allows 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 a trigger when setting up journeys
  • 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 journeys. 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.

There are two ways to update a contact field. Let's look at how each of those works.

Using the Actions section in the sidebar

The Action sidebar appears after clicking on the card on the right panel:

Using the Update Contact block

Learn more about this block here.

2. Save responses as downloadable results

Journeys allow you to build complex chat experiences 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.

  • On a no-code journey, you need to use the Save insights block to do this.
  • In a code journey, you need to use the write_result() function to capture specific responses and store them for analysis.
Using the Actions section in the sidebar

The Action sidebar appears after clicking on the card on the right panel:

Using the Save Insights block

In the image below, we have added a Profile field on our insights CSV file as Completed after the Name question.

Once set up, you can download these important interactions as CSV files using the Export Insights button. You will be emailed a CSV containing the stored interactions per user.

How do you save a response?

Although the Update contact and Save insights 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 Save insights.
  • From the dropdown, select the contact profile field you want to save the information to. Remember, the contact field you want to save 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 Journey interactions that are explicitly stored with the write_result() function/action will be downloadable.

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