Integrating Kustomer with Jotform Forms

Introduction and uses

Users of Jotform are aware of how easy the site makes it to create a quick, effective Form to begin embedding their link and receiving submissions right away. For the uninitiated, here’s an outside link for a quick tour. As a Kustomer user, having submissions from these Forms create Conversations in your instance is key to aggregating inbound customer activity.

 In this article, I’ll outline the procedure for bringing your customer-submitted Jotform Form data into your Kustomer instance to achieve that sweet, sweet synchronization. This is one of many possibilities of quick integrations with the Kustomer platform that makes use of our standardized web/form/email hooks and our powerful Workflow interface. Let’s get started!

Create a Form in Jotform

From the dashboard “/myforms” page on Jotform’s site, we can begin creating a new Form. The site has an excellent and easy-to-use interface (much like Kustomer’s own Knowledge Base Forms - shameless plug, check) that allows for a ton of customizing to be done over a very short period of time. Plug in each line of your new Form with relevant data fields. The new drafts should update and save automatically.

Getting your new Form to send information to a Webhook

Next, we’ll set up the Form submission to forward submitted data over to a Kustomer-generated Form Hook (more on setting that up in the next step) using Jotform’s onboard Webhook options. First, we’ll navigate over to the Settings tab in the  Form editor interface, and select Integrations. From there, we want to find the Webhooks integration. This will prompt you for a Webhook address. Leave this page open for now, and we’ll revisit it after the next step. 

FYI:  If you’re from the future, and there’s a separate Kustomer integration already built for Jotform, taking that route may prove to be easier/more intuitive than following this guide. 
 

Create a Form Hook in Kustomer

Next, in our Kustomer instance, we’ll need to create a Hook to accept data payloads from Jotform Forms. To do this, we’ll navigate over to: “https://<your-org-name>.kustomerapp.com/app/settings/inbound-webhooks”

and create a new Form Hook. Give it an insightful name and click on the options ellipses to copy the Hook’s URL. Once you have this in your clipboard, return to the Webhook Integration prompt in Jotform, and paste that address into the “Add Webhook” field, then click “Complete Integration”. Now, every time a Customer fills out and submits that Form, the information will be sent over to Kustomer’s Form Hook. 

Set up a Workflow to ingest data from that Form hook

Now we need to figure out what to do with that data payload as it reaches Kustomer. This step really depends on what you’re looking to accomplish with your Form. Workflows in Kustomer have some strong capabilities and can accomplish a wide variety of tasks, so it’s very important to scope out and outline what a Form submission event will trigger in your own instance. I’ll detail the workings of a short and simple Form ingest Workflow here, but yours may look drastically different from mine by the time it’s tailored to your own instance. More on how to shape your own Kustomer Workflows starting here.

We want to start off by selecting a trigger for the Workflow in question. The trigger App will be Hooks, and the resulting dropdown menu should give the Hook name/address we made in the previous step as a selectable option here. Once this is done, we can stop here and save the Workflow in its current state then toggle it on. 

Seeing as data will be sent from Jotform in JSON format, the next thing we need to look at is the “shape” of that payload. Using the “View Logs” tab at the bottom left corner of the Workflow UI, you will be able to monitor transactions that triggered this Workflow to run. Navigate over to your Jotform preview page and make a submission to trigger an event in the Workflow. Hovering over the output of your triggering transaction should show you what incoming data looks like. We’ll use this to distribute data through necessary channels for the remaining steps. Almost there! Now we just need to make this Form come in nice and pretty in Kustomer. 

Aaand we have contact!

Create Conversations based on your incoming Jotform data 

For the final step, we’ll need to decide what a submitted Form will look like in Kustomer. Form has its own Channel type in Kustomer, to accommodate our robust existing suite of Form capabilities (keeping those plugs coming in hot!), so most of this will look similar to following the steps provided in our “Create an Advanced Form” guide here.

The only other thing we’ll need to account for is to process the JSON and separate necessary fields using Regular Expressions (shoutout to https://regex101.com/) via an appropriate amount of Generic RegEx Match Workflow Action steps. More on those here.

Once the appropriate data is extracted and matched with our Regex steps, we can create some conditional logic, such as verifying whether or not a Customer’s profile exists or does not exist in your database already, and branch our actions. 

Example: 

• Customer Exists? > Create a Conversation > Create a Message in that Conversation

• Customer Doesn’t Exist? > Create a new Customer > Create a Conversation on that Customer’s Timeline > Create a Message in that Conversation

Once this is tested correctly in your instance, you’ve got yourself a cool customized integration with Jotform! Congrats! 

If there's any questions or roadblocks on the way to getting your Forms coming into Kustomer successfully, don’t hesitate to reach out to our award-winning Support team at support@kustomer.com and let us know where you’re stuck! 

We also love compliments. 

And cookies. Just throwing that out there…

Cheers!