📊 Data To Your CRM
Besides automating alerts and keeping your team informed about community activity, one of the most important ways to use webhooks is by integrating them with external CRM and marketing platforms. This means taking data within your community and sending it outward to applications that help you drive business results.
Through integrations like Zapier, you can send user information and updates directly from your community to external platforms like ActivePieces, Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, and more! This not only increases the different ways you can collect, interpret, and store data but also ensures that your CRM is constantly updated with the latest community and user data.
In this lesson, we will explore multiple ways in which data can be integrated with external platforms and the results they can achieve.
Sending Information to External Platforms
Utilizing outgoing webhooks ensures your CRM is constantly updated with the latest community and user data, helping you better organize marketing efforts and run automated campaigns.
For example, when a user joins your community, their first name, last name, and email address can be automatically logged into your CRM as a new lead. As the user becomes more active, their profile can be updated with new details, like achieving a VIP role or reaching a certain level in your community. When a user leaves your community, their email can be automatically added to a re-engagement list in your CRM. This allows you to include them in re-engagement campaigns, such as sending targeted emails to encourage them to return. Similarly, if you’re running campaigns for specific engagement levels or roles, your CRM reflects the latest data from your community, allowing you to segment and target effectively.
In addition, linking your community data to your CRM allows you to monitor engagement trends by logging when users achieve milestones like new levels, roles, or badges. It also helps you identify your most active users, making it easier to target them for loyalty programs or exclusive offers.
Connecting Returning.AI with your external CRM platforms streamlines tracking user engagement and guiding outreach, improving the accuracy and effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By continuously syncing your community data with your CRM, you maintain a clear picture of how users interact with your brand. This insight improves customer segmentation, boosts engagement through personalized outreach, and ensures your marketing and sales strategies align with real user behavior.
Utilizing Data through ActivePieces
Integrating Returning.AI with ActivePieces increases the ways in which you can utilize both webhooks and AI to transform your community data and introduce higher levels of community integration.
Creating a FAQ Bot
Webhooks can also power an automated FAQ bot to handle common questions from community members. Using an outgoing webhook, you can monitor messages in specific channels, such as a designated FAQ or support channel, where users post their queries. Each new message triggers the webhook, which sends the content, user information, and channel details to ActivePieces.
ActivePieces then routes the message to an AI assistant, such as OpenAI, for processing. The AI generates a response tailored to the question posed, ensuring the answer is relevant and accurate. The workflow doesn’t stop there—ActivePieces uses the processed response to interact with Returning.AI’s incoming webhooks. This setup posts the AI-generated reply back to the same channel, tagging the user who asked the question to ensure they see the response.
For example, if a user asks, “How do I reset my password?” the webhook workflow captures this question, processes it through the AI, and posts a reply like, “To reset your password, visit [link] and follow the instructions.” This process eliminates delays in answering common queries, enhances user experience, and allows your team to focus on more complex tasks.
Enhancing Data Points
While webhooks alone allow you to export and log many data points from your community and its users, incorporating them with AI allows you to infer a higher level of information from each data point.
For example, when monitoring messages in your community, you could infer information such as sentiment or spam potential by leveraging Returning.AI’s outgoing webhooks in conjunction with ActivePieces and OpenAI. Start by setting up an outgoing webhook in Returning.AI to trigger whenever a new message is posted in a channel. This webhook sends the message content, sender details, timestamp, and other metadata to ActivePieces, where the data is processed further.
In ActivePieces, the message is passed to OpenAI for analysis. The AI assigns a spam score on a predefined scale (e.g., 1–10) and provides a brief explanation of the score. For instance, a high score might indicate excessive use of flagged keywords or suspicious patterns. Once the analysis is complete, ActivePieces integrates with Google Sheets to log the data. Each message entry includes fields such as timestamp, sender name, message content, spam score, and the reasoning behind the score.
This workflow streamlines content monitoring, ensuring that all flagged messages are stored and categorized for later review. By automating this process, your team saves time while gaining a detailed, AI-backed overview of potentially harmful content within your community.
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