Using "The Machine"

This the second post in a two part series, in the first post we covered creating a customer feedback form and putting it on your web site.  This post will focus on creating a view to help manage the information collected from the feedback form and another view for displaying the good comments as customer testimonials on your web site. At the end of the post, there will be a video example that displays the whole process end to end. Let's start Using The Machine...

 Sign-in to Zoho Creator, if you are not already and click on the <Edit> button next to your "Customer Feedback" application.

Before we focus on the new items lets make a quick change to a form field that was created in the first post.  Here is a video of the change, but essentially I forgot to let you know to default the "Type Field" to the value of "New". This is important so that customer feedback when submitted has the type set to "New" by default. 

Now with that out of the way, we need to add a new view to our application. So on the <Views> tab click on the "[+]New View" link. Give the view a name like "New Customer Feedback" and make sure to check the "Edit" and "Bulk Edit" in the "Allow others to:"

View a video example of the creation of the new View.

Now click on the Set Criteria link as shown on the image below.

This is where we will configure the View to only show newly submitted feedback.  Change the selection from "All Records" to "Restricted Records". Now for the Criteria select the column "type" from the drop down and set it equals to "New".

Now our new "New Customer Feedback" view will only actually show "new" customer feedback.  You can now test the view by clicking the [Access this application > ] button and clicking on the "New Customer Feedback" view.

If you have no records, showing up in the new view it is probably due to not having any feedback with their types set to New. This could be because I had forgot mention to you to default the type field to the value of new.  If you look at the other view just the plain old "Customer feedback View" there should be submitted feedback you can edit these to have type of New.  You an also easily submit some new feedback by clicking on the "Customer Feedback" form or you can also do it from where you embedded the form on your web site. Just make sure that first your information has the type of "New" and then the "New Customer Feedback" view is displaying as expected.

Now let's create our final view, the "Customer Testimonials View" that will be used to show good feedback on your web site.  Once we get this view created we will come back and discuss the entire process and how both views will be utilized.

OK, so let's create the new view, just as last time click the [<Edit this application] once in edit mode once on the <Views> tab click on the "[+]New View" link. Give the view a name like "Customer Testimonials" no need to check anything in the "allow others to:" section as shown below:

Now we need to configure the view, this view will have more settings compared to the previous one.  First,  on the left side of the screen click on the " > Set Display Type" . Next, click the summary button and change the 2 records per row to 1. Next, click on the " > Column Properties" here we can remove columns that don't make sense to show on the view.  In our case I am going to remove all of the columns except for Name, Feedback and Location. You can also rename the columns here so let's change Name to "Customer" and "Feedback" to blank. Now press the [Done] button and you will be taken back to the preview page. On this page we can drag and drop the order of the columns, let's re-order the columns to Customer, Location and then the Feedback "which is the blank column".

View a Video example of the Customer Testimonial  View being configured.

Now that the view's columns are created, we need to worry about the information and for the customer testimonials view that means only showing feedback that has been marked appropriately.  Click on the " > Set Criteria" link and click on the restricted records and add the column "Show on Web Site" equals "true".

Next go to the " > Set Filters" link and remove the default filter on the "type" column by un-checking the box. The view now has everything setup and is ready for testing.

To test the view, first get out of edit mode by clicking the [Access this application >]button.  Now you will have to first mark a record as "Show on Web Site" so click on the "New Customer Feedback" view.  Edit a record  and change the type to "Good" and select "show on Web site" to test the view.

View the video example testing the new view.

Now as we did with the Customer Feedback form, click the [< edit this application] button and change the share properties of the customer testimonials view and change the view to be public.

View the quick video example of the View being set to Public

Finally we have to get the view on the web site so click on the [Access this application >] and then click on the "Customer Testimonials" view on the left side of the screen.  Next click on the "More Actions" and select  "Embed in your Website".  The "embed 'Customer Testimonials' view in your web site" dialog will appear, first thing is to click the "Click Here" link in order to access the view without login, the dialog box should turn a green color. Next, click the "Get JavaScript Snippet" link to change the embed code to the JavaScript version.  The JavaScript snippet is usually easier to integrate into a web site also make sure to modify the colors to match your web site. You can now copy and paste the code into your web site where you would like the Customer Testimonials to be displayed.

View the video example showing the embed steps.

That completes all of the steps, now let's talk about how to use everything all together.. there are a couple of things to do to make it easier.  First, let's update the forms notification email to include a link to the "New Customer Feedback" view this way when your receive an email notification with new feedback you can simply click the link to to mark it as "good or bad" and decide to show it on your web site or not.  The first thing to do is to get the "Permalink" link for the view, this can be found in the "More Actions" menu. Copy this link and then click on the Customer Feedback form and select the [< Edit this application], now in the forms "More Actions" menu click the "set email notification" link to bring up the notification window.  Now paste the link in the message area.

View the video example showing the form notification update.

So to close the post, I want to show how everything works end to end in a video. The below video shows a user submitting feedback, the notification email, I will then process the feedback e.g. mark it as "good" and check "show on web site" and then it will appear on my customer testimonials site.  This is all quick and easy.

View the final Video showing Automated Customer Testimonials end to end.

That is it for Automated Customer Testimonials, there are many variations and I encourage you to play around to find the best solution for your unique case.  Here are some quick ideas, to simplify only have the "Show On Website" check box and not the "type" field.  The "type" field (Good, Bad, New) allows you to track the number of good and bad feedback over time, obviously you might want to have other types to categories for feedback as well.  Finally, you might also want to only display portions of a customer's feedback, simply have another field setup so you can copy and paste the pieces that need to be displayed, this require more then checking a box but gives you finer control over the testimonial displayed without changing the original feedback.

As you can see there are many ways to do things, hopefully this post was educational enough to get you started.  As always, feel free to ask any questions if you run into any problems, meanwhile, have fun Using The Machine.