Do you know Typeform?
There are hundreds of great tools when it comes to providing an interface to customers or internal users to collect information.
Typeform is one of them and we’ve decided to invest into this platform due to its high level of flexibility and their top notch integration with integromat.
Some key features that we trully consider critical are:
- the abilty to use logic jumps so that you can design quite complex flow
- powerful modules to normalize inputs such as date, email or phone numbers
- absolute portability across all devices (computers, pads, mobile phones)
- a beautiful experience thanks to its neat and clean web design
Collecting data with Typeform
It all starts with the creation of a nice set of questions to capture the level of information you need.*
Typeform offers you various question types to make you form not only appealing from a Customer perspective but also pretty efficient as it will go straight to the point.
Once you’ve been able to identify what you needed to create your Customer engagement, it’s time to design a flow (should it be very simple) to start collecting information.
As you see, each question will capture and format all answers in the right way to make our job easier when trying to retrieve info into Integromat and play with our dataset.
Running the Typeform to process answers
Once you’ve finalized your Typeform, go to Integromat and create your scenario by adding a Typeform module into which you’ll be asked to create a webhook.
A webhook is an endpoint to which Typeform will connect each time a new answer is submitted by a Customer, using HTTP protocol to send information over.
Now you understand the power that lies into webhooks as we are talking real time processing. Which means that each time a Customer would hit the submit button in Typeform, Integromat would start running instantly.
Keep in mind that when you create a Typeform connection from Integromat, you don’t need to setup Typeform. It’s entirely automated as Integromat will configure Typeform to send all information to your specifc Integromat webhook by itself.
To test your connection, click the “Connect” button as shown below to access the webhook section which will help you save a lot of time.
Then click the “Webhooks” link to open the gold vault ;).
Within the webhooks menu, you can not only control your Integromat endpoint (starting with https…), check whether the link is active but also access all deliveries. This is a major asset as it will allow you to re-trigger data sending from Typeform to Integromat in order to settle your Integromat flow.
On the left side of the screen, you can get access to all past transactions that have been captured by your Typeform. You can hit the “Redeliver” button to re-trigger the flow whiteout having to fill the form once again. This is really useful.
But you can also click the “Send test request” button when you solely need to pass data format on to your Integromat scenario in order to start shaping your flow without wasting time filling forms back and forth.
Look at your data set to prepare your Google Sheet
Now you’re ready to design your process flow in Integromat. In order to successfully bring your Typeform data into your Google Sheet, it’s really important to understand the set of data you would like to store. Not all fields are worth storage.
Once you’ve sent your data from Typeform to Integromat, open the Typeform module and check out the set of fields you can play with.
Here we see that we can rely on 2 different set of information. First of all ones that are related to Typeform info (such as form ID, unique answer token, landed date and submission date) but also each and every answer that your Customer accepted to submit online and called “Mappable Answers” as show above.
There is a third family named by “hidden fields” which is highly powerful and upon which we’ll dedicate articles in the future as they bring indisputable value to business flows.
Mappable stands for the ability to “map” each field into any Integromat module in order to build a refined flow and fulfil your operational needs. In other way the essence of NoCode…
Build your Google Sheet
Create a new Google Sheet, name it properly and think twice before creating all columns that you need.
As a matter of fact, it’s important to carefully consider which information you need to store into your sheet that you can consider as a basic database where each row would represent a specific record.
Then the question is: which properties do you want to keep in your database for each Typeform submission? Here are a few best practices that we feel important to share.
- First of all, you need a unique ID per row. This is the only way to search records efficiently. In the example below, we’ve named it “UNIQUE_ID”.
- Then you want to keep track of key moments such as when your record has been created or updated. In that respect, we’ve created 2 columns named by “SUBMISSION_DATE” and “LAST_UPDATE” dedicated to them.
- Then you can create as many columns as you wish for all specific questions that you modeled into your Typeform.
Tip #1: make sure that you make your Google Sheet visual in order to easily distinguish the nature of each column, should it concern informative data (id, timestamps) or customer data (answers to your form).
Tip #2: it’s highly recommended to force column formatting, and especially for dates and numbers if you want them to be properly displayed afterwards.
Let’s connect Integromat to Google Sheet
Go back to Integromat then add a new Google Sheet module next to your Typefrom one.
Make sure that among the various capabilities you pick up the “Create New Row” one so that this module will have the opportunity to add information to your Google Sheet and create a brand new row each time a submission occurs.
Next step consists in mapping Typeform’s fields to the right column into your Google Sheet.
As usual, you can create advanced formulas to tweak information to your needs and make sure you enrich your Google Sheet the way you like.
Wrap-up
Now you know how to plug Integromat to both Typeform and Google Sheet to start sharing information from the former to the latter.
You’ve learnt how to save time from Typeform so that you can trigger data deliveries using their webhook section in order to watch Typeform payloads in Integromat and build your flow step by step.
Lastly, you’ve understood how to create a Google Sheet designed for Integromat and map relevant fields to populate your spreasheet the way you like.