Lead Routing Integration Guide

The ChannelSUITE Lead Routing Integration function provides the ability to generate leads for your channel from an “information request” form on your public website. A potential customer can inquire about certain products directly from your public website, and the Lead will then be stored and routed based on pre-defined routing rules for new Leads.

Technical Overview

The approach is this: you supply a form on your website and POST the form to our server. The information entered on the form will then be stored and routed based on pre-defined routing rules. There are certain required fields (see “required fields” below) that we require in order to get the process started. There are optional fields that are available to you if you want to capture extra information about the prospective Lead (see “optional fields” below). View sample code here for a form that utilizes all fields available. There are also required hidden fields that need to be added into the form in order for our server to be able to save and route the newly entered Lead.

Integration Steps

request a free directPostKey from your channelSUITE account manager
include the necessary javascript files
set up form using specified field names and field IDs
add the hidden yourEmail field to the form to discourage spambots
set the form ACTION to send form submissions to your channelSUITE install
test the form using the built-in test mode
turn off test mode

more details on these steps are shown below

Javascript Includes

several javascript files are needed to set up client-side validation and the country-specific state/province select box. all the files can be loaded from the channelsuite server as shown, or if you prefer you can download the files and host them on your server. Note: The stateProvinceMap technically contains dynamic data, but it only changes if support for states/provinces is added for an additional country in your channelsuite database, so in practice you may treat it as a static file.

add this in the <head> section of your html

<!-- CHANNELSUITE REQUIRED -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yourChannelsuiteURL/API/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yourChannelsuiteURL/API/js/leadsForm.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yourChannelsuiteURL/API/js/stateProvinceMap.js.cgi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yourChannelsuiteURL/API/js/stateWidget.js"></script>
<!-- end CHANNELSUITE REQUIRED -->

Form Contents

Notes:

All fields names are case sensitive.
When using ampersand characters in select/hidden field values, do not entity encode.

REQUIRED fields

The following fields are required in order to create a new Lead:

Company Name - the name of the company looking for information on your products

<input value="" name="company" type="text" id="company">

Contact - the first and last name of the contact so we know who to get in touch with

<input value="" name="contact" type="text" id="contact">

E-Mail - the e-mail address of the contact belonging to the company

<input value="" name="email" type="text" id="email">

Country - the country in which the company requesting information is located. See below for more information about standard country codes. Note: the “onchange” event handler is only required if you use a state/province field in your form (recommended if you service customers in US or Canada)

<select id="countryCode" name="countryCode" onchange="stateWidgetCallback();">
  option tags go here, see below
</select>

OPTIONAL fields

The following fields are optional in order to record more information about the prospective company requesting information:

Phone - the phone of the contact belonging to the company

<input value="" name="phone1" type="text" id="phone1">

Interest - what product are you mainly interested in

<input value="" name="interest" type="text">

Campaign - is this Lead assigned to any Campaign that the prospective customer may have been to

<input value="" name="campaign" type="text">

Referral - how did the prospective customer hear about your business

<select name="how">
    <option value="">Make a Selection</option>
    <option selected="selected" value="Referral">Referral</option>
    <option value="I am a customer">I am a customer</option>
    <option value="Trade Show">Trade Show</option>
    <option value="Company Website">Company Website</option>
    <option value="Search Engine">Search Engine</option>
    <option value="Trade Publication">Trade Publication</option>
    <option value="Other">Other</option>
</select>

Street - street address of prospective customer

<input value="" name="street1" type="text">

City - city of prospective customer

<input value="" name="city" type="text">

State/Province - the code for the state or province of prospective partner. Leave an empty element with ID “statecell”, this will be filled in dynamically by the stateWidget javascript. See below for more information on setting up the state/province codes.

<span id="statecell"></span>

Postal Code - postal code of prospective customer

<input value="" name="zip" type="text">

Comments - any other comments that the prospective customer may want to share

<textarea name="custom_flds" cols="80" rows="5"></textarea>

REQUIRED hidden fields

The following hidden fields are required in order to save the information to the database:

directPostKey
- The value of this field must match the directPostKey assigned to you on the server. Please ask your account manager to get you a “directPostKey”.

<input type="hidden" name="directPostKey" value="authenticated">

OPTIONAL hidden fields

saveRecord
- the following hidden field is used for testing your form. when this hidden field is set to 0, submitted form contents are echoed back to the screen and are NOT submitted to the channelsuite recruit database. if this field doesn't exist or is set to any value other than 0, the form is processed normally.

<input id="saveRecord" name="saveRecord" value="0" type="hidden">

apiFlag
- this flag is set when you want to have returned to you an xml stream of the results after submission. By setting this flag, the thank you page will not be displayed after the lead has been successfully submitted. The following are possible return values based on what is submitted:
  - For a successful entry where leadId is the primary key of the lead that was just created:

<response>
  <result>1</result>
  <leadId>2133</leadId>
</response>

If the Leads API is not turned on for your install (contact your channelSUITE account representative to have it enabled):

<response>
  <result>0</result>
  <message>Leads API is not enabled for this install.</message>
</response>

If the <directPostKey> hidden field is not set, an error is returned:

<response>
  <result>0</result>
  <message>Authentication failed. Authentication key not set.</message>
</response>

If the <directPostKey> hidden field is set but incorrect (contact your channelSUITE account representative to confirm your <directPostKey> value), the following error is returned:

<response>
  <result>0</result>
  <message>Authentication failed.  Incorrect authentication key.</message>
</response>

If the Company and Contact name are both left blank, the following error is returned:

<response>
  <result>0</result>
  <message>Company or Contact is a required field.</message>
</response>

If the E-mail address is left blank, the following error is returned:

<response>
  <result>0</result>
  <message>Email address is a required field.</message>
</response>

source
- this field is used when you have multiple public forms submitting new leads. once a form is submitted, the forwarding URL is retrieved from the directPostThankYouURL setting. this source variable is then appended to this URL as a parameter so that your public web site that processes this URL can distinguish from which page this lead has been submitted. an example of how this URL would look with the source attached is as follows:

if your config setting is:

    directPostThankYouURL = 'http://myPublicWebsite.com/lead_return/'

and your form's source variable is set in a hidden field like this:

    <input name="source" value="publicSite1" type="hidden">

then after submitting the form, the user will be redirected to this URL on your site:

    http://myPublicWebsite.com/lead_return/?source=publicSite1

CUSTOM fields

In the event that you want to capture more information than the fields outlined above, you can also add in your own custom fields which will be saved into the Comments field in the record. Should you have two custom fields, namely:

<input type="text" name="custom_1" value="Custom field 1">

<input type="text" name="new_field" value="A new field">

The following will be appended to the Comments field:
custom_1: Custom field 1
new_field: A new field

The name of the field will be entered first, followed by a colon (:) and then the value the user entered. Any of these extra fields will be added to the end of any existing Comments already entered. A new line will separate multiple user defined custom fields.

Anti-spam: the 'comments' hidden field

Forms on public websites are often targets for “spambots” – automated “spiders” that wander around the web looking for forms. The spambot puts its irrelevant message in whatever fields it can find, and submits the form in the hopes that the posted content will show up somewhere where it will be seen. These submissions would show up as bogus entries in your leads database. Quite annoying.

Spambots aren't very sophisticated, and they can be effectively defeated by using a “captcha”, the most common example being to ask your users to type in the text from a distorted text image. This works, but it's irritating to your users. We're using a simpler method called a “honeypot”. We add a field to your form that users can't see, but that the spambots can't easily identify as a hidden field. The spambots will typically insert content into this field. If the field isn't empty, it's usually a spambot submission, and we reject it with an appropriate error message. It contains a label that instructs users of alternative browsers (handicapped-accessible screen readers, for example) to leave the field empty. This method is very effective, and causes no problems for legitimate users.

To implement the honeypot, simply add the following hidden span containing the empty field 'comments' in your form:

                          <span style="display:none;visibility:hidden;">
			     <label for="comments">
			     Ignore this text box. It is used to detect spambots.
			     If you enter anything into this text box, your submission
			     will be rejected.
			     </label>
			     <input type="text" name="comments" size="1" value="" id="comments" />
			  </span>

Note: prior to October 2010, the form element name for the honeypot field was 'yourEmail'. This was deemed problematic because some automatic form population tools (like the one built into the Google Chrome browser) were over ambitious and were putting an email in the honeypot field as well, generating false positives.

Setting Up the Country Code Select Box

Channelsuite uses a normalized list of standard country codes. The list of country codes used in your channelSUITE install can be found by running the “country list” API as described in api_helper_functions. Just copy and paste this list of html <option> tags (or a subset if you don't recruit globally) into the countryCode <select> container.

Setting up the State/Province Code Select Box

If you provide service in countries such as US and Canada where states or provinces are commonly used, you'll want to use the channelSUITE list of normalized stateProvinceCode values for that country. But this is even trickier than the countryCode select box, since the list of states/provinces is country-specific. The good news is, all the steps necessary to make this work have already been covered above:

load the stateProvinceMap and stateWidget javascript files
set the “onchange” on the countryCode field
provide a <span> or table cell with id=“statecell” for the javascript to insert the state/province select box.

Now your form will dynamically provide the correct state/province field options for the chosen country, based on the list of supported countries in your copy of the channelSUITE database.

Testing Your Form

set the hidden field saveRecord value=0 and submit. you should see the correct form values echoed back. make sure to check that the state/province field options look right for countries that use standard states or provinces (by default we support US, Canada, and Mexico, but you may request others). when you're ready to go live, change saveRecord to value=1.

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