Contact Us -> CRM Airtable integration

[adorayi]

📇 User story
As a team members of GC Design System, I want to keep record of the individuals who connect with us via the contact us form and update their progress as a client, so that we don't miss tracking active or prospective users.

✅ Definition of Done / Outcomes
Everyone who connects with us via the Contact Us page is automatically added to the CRM with appropriate tagging.

📜 Acceptance criteria

• Consultation with Support on the solution.
• People who submit a contact us are automatically created in Airtable CRM
• Tags are reflected for "active user"; usability research; mailing list, etc.
• Way to prevent duplication of additions in CRM (duplication checks)
• Freshdesk continues to receive tickets re: support questions, demo requests (maybe mailing list and usability research volunteer don't need to go to Freshdesk?)
• Update privacy notice

📝 More info
Currently Support can activate an automation (to add the contact to the CRM with appropriate tag) for anyone who reaches out to us for a demo; mailing list or user research. They have not done this for contact us generic questions. They noted if we do it for generic questions; that will be everyone who reaches out to us; thus a better solution would be to create the automation directly from Contact Us website > Airtable (rather than Contact Us website > Freshdesk > trigger automation by Support > Airtable).

🚫 Out of scope
Freshdesk support flow.

[adorayi]

Need access to Airtable api. @brockhigg10 if you are an admin on the CRM file you may be able to create a personal access token with the scope to write to the CRM base table.
https://airtable.com/create/tokens/new

[adorayi]

Check with Jimmy P who can give some advice to start integrating with Airtable.

[adorayi]

Start with investigation into the Airtable API and take it from there.

[daine]

Meeting with Jimmy this morning to get some ideas

[daine]

Rough implementation plan:
CDS Contact Us Form -> Submissions API
In Submissions API:

• Send details to Freshdesk API

  • Create ticket in Freshdesk
  • Get response, save response ID (ticket ID)

• Send details to Airtable API

  • Get person (check if email address exists)
  • If person exists
    • Get all information, store it
    • Append new information such as tags
    • Add support ticket number
  • If person does not exist
    • Create new person
    • Add appropriate information such as tags
    • Add support ticket number

[daine]

I now have access to the CRM and also created a Service Account for the team that we can use for future integrations. The account is designsystem-service@cds-snc.ca.

Today I started by duplicating the Base without any of the records. Because there are no records, I'll have to see if I can add records first and see how that goes.

[daine]

I haven't had enough capacity to work on this, will pause on this until I have more capacity.