CustomerGauge

Data Input Options / Import Templates

Getting data into CustomerGauge has two components:

  1. Data format or file type (CSV, XLS etc)
  2. Data transport mechanism (API or FTP etc)

We cover both components below. For continuous surveying systems we recommend using XML format with API transport. It’s most secure and reliable. If the terms are strange for  you our Client Ops Team will be delighted to help – it’s much easy than it sounds!

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Data Format

Getting data into CustomerGauge is simple – we cover major data formats including CSV, TXT, Excel/Google Spreadsheet XLS format or XML. One thing to watch especially with spreadsheets is the date format. As standard, we recommend YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss. Non-English characters can also be a headache, so please let us know the encoding (eg UTF-8).

Available formats:

Data file used from an e-commerce system? Records are sometimes formatted as multiple lines per sales order (if more than one item per line). We can adjust the import template to account for that.

CustomerGauge “de-duplicates” data, so you need not worry about sending a file twice.

How to format data for import into CustomerGauge b2c

You can format data in several ways for CustomerGauge. For b2b/relationship, we’ll probably do a one-time upload. For  b2c/continuous we’ll probably be setting up an automated process to get the data every day or week.

Fields

We can accept just a few fields if available. Mandatory fields are:

  • Email
  • SKU
  • order_value
  • date_of_order

However, most clients send a very rich feed. If you can supply, we can accept around different 20 segment fields (and report on them).

We recommend XML – it’s the safest format for non-ASCII characters.

Transport Mechanism

Our transport mechanisms include email*, FTP*, SFTP, API or in-application upload. This means that we can take data from almost every CRM system, including Salesforce.com, SAP CRM, SugarCRM, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics. Alternatively, we can take transactional data straight from popular e-commerce systems including DigitalRiver, Magento, automating the upload so it happens in the background every day.

If that doesn’t fit, our development team have almost certainly got a plug-in that can be customised to fit your application. *We use email and FTP as a “last resort” as it falls outside our strict security protocol – so we’ll need confirmation from you or your client to do this.

Methods:

  • SFTP (you automate sending of file to our Secure FTP site) - 2nd preference
  • Email (we supply a special email address for you to send the file to)
  • Manual import (from within the CustomerGauge application you can upload a file)
  • API – one transaction at a time (used for checkout or similar) or multiple record upload (preferred) – learn more

We’re happy to give advice and support on all the above.

CustomerGauge