It’s a question we get frequently: How do I get this Salesforce.com report emailed to my boss. Or my direct-mail printer. Or to myself.

That’s where we have developed a feature in 5Buckets. You create a Bucket in 5Buckets that points to the SFDC report, and then Schedule it to be emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s as simple as that! The report lands in the boss’ or direct-mail printer’s or your Inbox as a CSV file. Open it up in Excel (or Calc if you are an Open Office user) and enjoy!

Last week we released the latest version of 5Buckets. This last release was centered around one major feature - integrating with Vontoo.

Vontoo is a permission based voice messaging product. Their tagline is “Say It. Send It. Track It.” Essentially you can create audio clips and have Vontoo make phone calls to your list of opt-in subscribers. Sounds a little intrusive? Initially I thought so too. Phone calls after all have a little urgency to them. So receiving marketing messages on your phone is definitely annoying.

However, there are many situations where I want to get a phone call - school delays, weather alerts come to mind first. But beyond those reminder of a webinar I signed up for or a company wide communication by the CEO also lend themselves to phone calls. Vontoo has a customer in the music industry. The band has recorded messages and phone calls go out to fans about upcoming concerts, ticket sales & CD releases. Hmm, I certainly won’t mind a recorded message from Bono or Paul McCartney. :)

5Buckets is now integrated with Vontoo. It is another “output device” much like ExactTarget is an output device for email communications. The “input device” - the placeholder for phone numbers & email addresses - can be Salesforce.com or your own SQL Server database. For example, you can create a report in Salesforce.com that lists customers that completed their one year anniversary with you. Every day, 5Buckets will pull from Salesforce.com the list of customers with anniversary today and send them a pre-recorded voice message from Vontoo thanking them for their business.

This simple scenario can be extended to include email communications. For example, 30 days before the anniversary date an email could be sent by 5Buckets reminding the same customers that their renewal is due. An email as a renewal reminder, and a personal phone call on their anniversary thanking the customer when they renew.

A project we are wrapping up here at Right On Interactive is an integration between Salesforce.com and a chat tool called “Boldchat”. You may have been to web sites where they let you chat with the sales person or a customer service representative. So, instead of emailing or calling the company, you can chat with a live person right on the company’s website. Boldchat is one such product that enables companies to provide the chat feature on their website.

We have a customer that uses Boldchat on their website; the chat is used by prospects looking for product information. We recently implemented Salesforce.com for this customer and customized their online quote request form to create an Opportunity in Salesforce.com when someone submits the form. Customer was really happy with the way the Opportunities were coming in from the online quote form (slight digression – the quote form checks if the person submitting the form is already in SFDC and creates or updates the record; additional data is captured in a custom object) that he decided that he wants the chat sessions in Boldchat to create Opportunities in SFDC too.

Boldchat is a mature product. They have a well documented API. So, the initial question of “how can we get the data out of Boldchat” was answered quickly – use the API! The next question on my mind was – “but chat sessions are quite unstructured”. Unlike an online quote form, an IM session is very loose and “all over the place”. There is no telling when or how chat visitor indicated their name, their contact information or what product they were looking for. I even looked at the some of the chat sessions and the sessions were literally all over the place. They ranged from simple questions to detailed technical discussions.

We solved the problem by using what’s called a “pre-chat survey”. The chat visitor is required to fill-out some initial information like their name & phone number and some other optional information. That gives us the basic information we need to create/update Contacts in SFDC; and the entire text of the chat session is then dropped in as an Opportunity with the LeadSource set to Boldchat.

Boldchat’s website is: www.boldchat.com and more info about Boldchat’s API is here: http://wiki.boldchat.com/api/

Here’s a quick little tip about the new ExactTarget Webservices API, particularly the one that does the integration between Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. When you trigger an email send using the ETforAppEx API, make sure you specify -

a) IndividualResults = true;

b) IndividualResultsSpecified = true;

This will ensure that the send, open(s), click(s) are dumped in to Salesforce.com by ExactTarget. The manual says there is no need to explicity specify IndividualResults, and that the tracking will be dumped in to SFDC by default. But as a good practice I would strongly recommend you specify it explicitly. You really don’t want to be left guessing if that tracking information will really be sent to SFDC or not.

Send me an email (adalvi -at- rightoninteractive.com) if you want a more detailed code sample.

For those of you that are building out multiple landing pages I have a simple javascript that may help you with passing variables from campaign url strings into your landing pages.

For example, if you have landing pages that contain identical forms and only need unique “lead source” information you can use this javascript to pull a variable passed in a url string to change the lead source information.

Place the following code where you would normally put your hidden lead source fields.

<script>
function getQueryVariable(variable) {
var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
var vars = query.split(”&”);
for (var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) {
var pair = vars[i].split(”=”);
if (pair[0] == variable) {
return pair[1];
}
}
}</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” language=”JavaScript”><!–
document.write(’<input ‘);
document.write(’ type=”hidden” ‘);
document.write(’ name=”lead_source” ‘);
document.write(’ value=”‘ + getQueryVariable(”ls”) + ‘”>’);
//–></script>

You can then access the page with the variable attached to the url:

www.yourwebpage.com/landingpage.html?ls=leadsource1

The variable populates the hidden form field with the lead source information.

<input name=”lead_source” value=”leadsource1″ type=”hidden”>

When the user clicks submit the information will populate in salesforce.com eliminating the need for multiple landing pages.

You can also use this in correlation with you analytics link ids to maintain consistency in your reporting. Just change the variable in this line of code:

document.write(’ value=”‘ + getQueryVariable(”change-this-value”) + ‘”>’);

You can be creative and use this script to pass multiple values if needed…think about personalizing the landing page from a personalized url string in an email. You could pre-populate a form or even personalize the landing page with their name or any number of attributes in the email database!

Best of luck to you!