Collect information from a customer using a journey

You can share a journey with a customer or prospect for them to complete and save your staff time, give your user convenience and get your fact find information right first time. The journey can be displayed within your website as an iFrame which allows you to wrap your brand around it. It can also act as a standalone page reached via a redirect within your website flow or by sending your customer a link to it via an email template variable. The standalone page is mobile and tablet friendly so your customers can complete at a time and place most convenient to them.

Prerequisites

A journey is a tool to gather additional information against an existing lead. A lead must therefore exist before you can share a journey with your customer.

The method to create a journey is the same irrespective of whether it is for use by your staff or use by your customers. The Journeys editor is accessed through Settings > Journeys in FLG CRM. Access is controlled by the Administration permission "Enable user to manage forms and journeys". An introduction to Journeys will tell you more.

Ensure the journey you wish to share with customers is carefully designed and built to make it clear and concise. Ensure it is also connected to the correct lead group. Consider splitting up long fact find journeys with headings, horizontal lines and pages to split it up. A journey must be completed in full by your customer and cannot be partially completed or saved for later.

Email a journey URL to your customer

The most simple way to email a journey URL to your customer is to add it to an email as a template variable. When you send the email to your customer from FLG either manually, via a lead action or within a workflow, FLG creates a unique session for that journey which links it back to a specific lead. The journey URL is valid until the journey is submitted at which point it expires and can no longer be used.

To add a journey URL to an email template:

1. Click Settings > Templates and open an existing email template or create a new template by clicking Add New Template and selecting the lead group to associate the template with

2. Click Insert template variable above the email template subject

   
   

3. Expand the Journey links section and go to where the descriptions start with "Link for..." and the variables are prefixed with JURL - JURL indicates that it is a journey URL

   
   

4. Place the cursor in the email editor subject or body at the point you want the journey URL

5. Click the name of the journey in the Journey links section you want to include in your email

   
   

6. The journey URL template variable will be inserted into your email template in { and } tags

   
   

7. At the time of sending the email, the template variable is replaced with the journey URL relating to the lead, which your customer can open

Show a journey as an iFrame in your website or as part of your website flow

This is an advanced option which will require input and action by the person responsible for your website. Refer to the Journey session API documentation for full information. This works by posting a request to FLG and FLG posting a response which includes a public URL which you load on your website for your customer to access the journey. 

The request to FLG includes:

• Resource URL to identify your FLG domain
• Authorization which gives your website permission to access your journeys
• Lead to allow FLG to create a journey session unique to a lead - this is why the lead must exist before a journey can be used to collect more information on that lead
• Journey to identify the journey you wish to show your customer
• Confirmation that you want the journey session to be made public

This information is split between the request header and body as defined in the Journey session API documentation.

The FLG response includes a public URL (publicURL) which your website loads for your customer to get access to a specific journey which will save information against a specific lead when the journey is submitted.

It is possible to generate a lead using established lead API methods before loading a journey and making it appear to your customer as a single process. There is currently no way to use a journey to create a new lead.

How to retrieve your domain (for Resource URL)

To show a journey as an iFrame or as part of your website, first retrieve your domain. This is the address your browser uses to access FLG: https://<your domain>.flg360.co.uk. For instance, should you access FLG by navigating to https://demo.flg360.co.uk then your domain would be "demo".

How to generate an Access Key (for Authorization)

1. Click Settings > Configuration > Access Keys
2. Click Add New Access Key
3. Add an Access Key Description to identify it

4. Check the permission Allow access to Journeys - no other permissions are needed

   
   

5. Click Continue

How to retrieve your lead ID

The method to retrieve the lead ID depends on your workflow but it's likely that this will be posted in an earlier API response such as when a customer generated a lead on your website using the create lead API. Refer to our API documentation for more information.

How to retrieve your journey ID

1. Click Settings > Journeys
2. Click the required journey

3. From the journey editor click the Options icon (three dots) in the top right

   
   

4. Select Properties

   
   

5. Copy the Journey ID

   
   

6. Click Cancel

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