There are two different Ruby gems out there right now to choose from:

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

Kabari Hendrick released this Ruby gem to integrate Ruby with the SurveyGizmo API v.1 using an ActiveModel style interface. It interfaces with survey API resources such as surveys, questions, pages, options, and responses. It also supports all of the actions provided by the API: get, create, update, delete, and get list. There is also error handling.

You can follow these links to check out the survey-gizmo-ruby repository, see an extended usage example, or read the documentation.

Kabari’s company, Lab42, uses it in a few different places, such as this survey tool.

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

Bobby Uhlenbrock with Ample built this Ruby Gem, which currently focuses heavily on pulling response data from the SurveyGizmo API.

Bobby told us, “My goal was to make this as easy to drop into an app as the Twitter gem. Therefore, if you’ve ever used the Twitter gem, this should make immediate sense.”

You can follow the links below to see the surveygizmo Ruby Gem repository, as well as check out the documentation.

**We’ve also added both of these gems to our Survey API Resources page to make them easy to find in the future.

What’s Next

Both developers told us that their gems weren’t yet finished, and could use some help in the form of contributors, bug-finders, etc…so if you’re a Ruby developer who wants to make it easy to integrate your apps with SurveyGizmo, go get involved!

We love it when people build cool things with our API – thanks to Bobby and Kabari for getting these started! If you’ve used these Ruby gems (or the SurveyGizmo API) to build something great, please drop us an email and let us know! We’d love to talk to you more about it.

It’s called the Developer’s Corner and you can check it out over here: http://developer.surveygizmo.com/

It’s your one-stop shop for getting documentation on the new REST API, ask questions and have a direct conversation with the developers who created the API at SurveyGizmo and other developers working on integrations, keep up-to-date with the latest releases through the blog, and eventually it will be a place to buy and sell widgets you create to integrate with SurveyGizmo.

To go along with the Developer’s Corner, we’ll be hosting a webinar on using the REST API, called:

Creating new Custom Question Types in SurveyGizmo
Learn how to use the new custom framework to create and report on your own custom question types.

Join us Friday, April 22nd from 10AM – 11AM EDT (GMT -4) – Register now

There are only 100 spots available for the webinar and will fill up quickly, so please register as soon as you can.

We’re planning big things for the Developer’s Corner so if you’re looking to create an integration or are just more interested in using the API, you’ll want to head over there.

We use ZenDesk for our support ticket system here at SurveyGizmo, and in the process we have integrated our customer feedback survey directly into the system. The only requirements for this integration are a ZenDesk account and any SurveyGizmo account (though for some additional link branding, we recommend the Pro or Enterprise plans).

The goal is to get feedback from the customer once a support issue has been resolved, so we can better get feedback about how well our customer service team is doing. You could setup many types of surveys and trigger them at different times within ZenDesk. Maybe a welcome email that collects additional information about an email sent to a specific department (such as billing). The options are completely up to you. The following example assumes you are getting customer feedback when a request is solved. You might also like to attach a survey link to the email footer of ALL emails. This is helpful in case a customer want s to provide feedback on the length of time it’s taking to resolve an issue.

In ZenDesk

• Select Manage from the ZenDesk menu and choose Triggers and email notifications
• If you already have a trigger for a Solved ticket, you can edit the existing trigger. This example assumes you are creating a new one, so click Add Trigger
• Setup the following recommended conditions:

  • Status | Changed to | Solved

  • Comment is... | Public

  This ensures that the email is sent only when an issue is deemed resolved and a comment was added (this last condition is optional).

• The next step is the ‘Perform These Actions’ section:

  • Notify User | (requester)

  • Email Subject:

    [{{ticket.account}}] Re: {{ticket.title}}

  • Email body (adjust wording as needed):

    Your request (#{{ticket.id}}) has been deemed solved.  Let us know how we did!
    http://YOUR-SURVEYGIZMO-LINK/?rep={{ticket.assignee.first_name}}+{{ticket.assignee.last_name}}
     
    To review, comment and reopen the request, follow the link below:
    http://{{ticket.url}}
     
    {{ticket.public_comments_formatted}}

This is an example of what we use, but the key area for you is the survey link. You will want to replace http://YOUR-SURVEYGIZMO-LINK/ with your survey link (Get this using the instructions below). The second portion, starting with the question mark ( ? ), is a query string. This information is automatically collected by SurveyGizmo (more on using this later). It allows you to automatically associate the ticket’s assignee to that feedback. We’ve used the variable name ‘rep’ in this case. For consistency, later instructions will assume you are also using ‘rep’. You could also pass in any ticket information like ticket ID, type, external ID, customer or organization name, etc.

In SurveyGizmo

You can create a customer feedback survey from scratch or use one of the pre-made templates we provide when you are creating a new survey (our example). Once the survey is created, you can Launch that survey, presenting you with a selection of links on the Publish tab. Here are a few examples:

All plan levels:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/34173/support-survey/

Professional and above (Branded Subdomains):

http://surveygizmo.support.sgizmo.com/

Enterprise level plans:

http://surveys.yourdomain.com/support/

Replace the link in the Email body example above with your survey’s link.

Pro Tip: For Internet Explorer 6 compatibility, make sure the links ends with a forward slash ( / ).

What else do I setup in the survey itself?

When your respondents click on that link, they will be presented with your survey, automatically passing to the survey the assignee’s full name. Within your survey, your very first question may be an open textfield question asking the respondent to enter their support representative’s name. Within SurveyGizmo, you can set the Default Value of this question as the following:

[%%GET_rep]

This special merge code is getting the representative’s name that was passed in when they clicked the link, placing that in the box automatically. This saves your respondents time while still allowing them to change the name if they wish. Be advised, if you changed ‘rep’ in the Solved email link above, you need to change it within that merge code as well.

Congratulations, you’ve now setup a very simple and elegant integration between SurveyGizmo and ZenDesk for your customer feedback survey! If you need help setting up your survey to accept your Zendesk info grap a SurveyGizmo account, build your survey and then drop our customer support a note!

Once SurveyGizmo Lab Week is completed next Thursday, all SurveyGizmo employees will cast their votes for the best project. The winner will receive the highly coveted prize, chosen by the development team: a Lego Motorized Walking AT-AT™!  Pew pew!

Now, let’s meet the contenders. In no particular order,

Joseph West is building a Survey-wide Spellcheck (utilizing the GNU Aspell library) with multiple language support. This spell check will function much like Search and Replace, checking the spelling in pages, questions, reports, and more.  It then displays the misspellings and offers suggestions for each word. The initial version will simply display the suggestions, but streamlined replacement functionality will be added over time to make it easier to replace any word with one of the suggestions, or with something you type in yourself.

Jean-Francois Hardy is working on a new interactive tutorial system. Unlike our written tutorials, it will teach you how to use SurveyGizmo by performing various tasks. It will present a description of what needs to be done and why, and then highlight the areas on the screen where the step should be performed. The tutorials will walk you through commonly-requested support questions, and teach you new things about SurveyGizmo in real-time, from within your own account.

Chad Shinsato is working on a page jumping logic analyzer. This tool will analyze your default, simple and advanced page jumping logic and display all the possible page paths that your survey takers can take, allowing you to easily debug issues in your survey.

Finally, Jase Smith is working on creating a SurveyGizmo mascot. Jase tells us that it’s been a fun challenge to come up with a character that fits the SurveyGizmo persona. With his life-long love for comic books, cartoons, and anime style art, we are sure he’ll come up with something everyone will love!

Credit also goes to rock-star CTO Christian Vanek, who has heroically covered all of the technical support during SurveyGizmo Lab Week, allowing the development team to fully dedicate their efforts to their projects.

Best of luck, guys! And, while one of these projects will be voted “best” on October 22, ultimately we feel as though all of our users win!