Surveys can be a great way to collect information from customers and prospects. With a tool like SurveyGizmo, you can build online forms and surveys to learn more about your customers in minutes.
Add Formstack Documents to the process and you can take the data you’re collecting via your surveys and automatically populate customized reports and other documents like contracts, invoices, and more.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a thank you letter to send to survey respondents. To actually mail the letter, we’ll be integrating with a service called Lob.
To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our letter using a Word document. Inside our Word document, we’re going to add our normal letter information (logo, address, etc) and then for the spots that we want to show our respondent’s information, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$Address}, {$FavoriteColor}.
Here’s what our letter template looks like:
After we have our template setup, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step pick Office Document as the document type and then select the file from your computer.
Once you have uploaded your template, you’re going to be taken to the Settings tab where you can change various settings like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and we’ll include the name of our respondent in the file name.
Next, we’re going to set up the delivery of our document to Lob so that it is automatically printed and mailed to our respondents. From the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and select Lob from the list. Once you enter your Lob API Key, you’ll need to pick the merge fields that hold the address for your respondent.
After you have finished the Lob delivery, we’re done with the setup in Formstack Documents and we’re ready to set up our integration with SurveyGizmo. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier, go ahead and create a New Zap. For the trigger, we’re going to pick SurveyGizmo as the service and then New Survey Response as the trigger.
After you authenticate your SurveyGizmo account, Zapier will load a list of the surveys in your account. Go ahead and pick the survey that you want to merge data from.
Next, we’re going to set up the Action of the Zap. Go ahead and pick Formstack Documents as the service and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of the documents in your account. Go ahead and pick the letter template that you just setup. Once you pick the template, Zapier is going to load a list of all the merge fields in your document.
For each of the merge fields in your document, you need to pick the corresponding fields from SurveyGizmo. This tells Zapier how to send the data over to Formstack Documents so that it is populated in the correct spot on your document.
Once you have all of your merge fields matched up, we’re ready to turn on the Zap and run a test! Go ahead and save your Zap then login to SurveyGizmo and submit a test response to your survey. Zapier will detect this new response and it will send the information over to Formstack Documents where your letter will be generated and sent over to Lob.
Here’s what our letter looked like ready to mail:
Congrats, you’re all finished! You can now automatically generate all kinds of documents from your SurveyGizmo responses. Can you think of any other ways to use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?