In 2016, three Shopify enthusiasts—Sam (a former agency owner), Steve (an app creator), and Alex (an app creator and CTO)—came together to form Union Works. Since then, they’ve launched nine apps, with seven still making waves in the Shopify ecosystem. Their standout and fastest growing app, Grapevine Surveys, an app that’s changing the game for how merchants collect customer feedback.
The story behind Grapevine Surveys
Grapevine Surveys started as a way to ask customers one simple question when they checked their order status: “How did you hear about us?” The name “Grapevine Surveys” was inspired by the classic Motown song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” perfectly capturing its purpose of discovering how customers find stores. It’s since evolved into a full-fledged survey tool that helps merchants gather deeper insights about their customer acquisition channels.
Recently, Union Works added exciting features to Grapevine Surveys, including including multi language surveys, Shopify POS UI Extensions for in-store customer experience surveys, and the ability to conduct surveys during online checkout using Checkout UI extensions. They’ve also built extensions for their app in Shopify Flow, unlocking even more capabilities for merchants—from notifying their Customer Support team with a Slack ping to populating a Google Sheet with survey responses for deeper insights.
How Grapevine Surveys Uses Shopify Flow
Shopify Flow is a tool for building workflow automations. With Flow, merchants can automate both simple and complex tasks, improving their operational efficiency and saving them time.
Shopify Partners can integrate their apps—like Grapevine Surveys—with Flow to unlock even more possibilities through custom tasks, such as triggers and actions. Let’s say a merchant uses Grapevine Surveys to collect post-purchase surveys. By integrating with Flow, they can automatically thank or reward their customers with a Shopify discount or reward points via third-party apps. By configuring a workflow to start when a customer completes the survey, merchants can add a tag in Shopify indicating they’re an engaged customer, then send follow-up marketing that highlights promotions on their shop using Shopify Email, or reward them with loyalty points in third-party apps such as Smile, Yotpo, or Rise.
The challenge: Finding new opportunities
Union Works identified a valuable opportunity to enhance merchants' experiences by integrating their services with other apps and providing seamless data connection solutions. However, the actual process of developing these integrations posed significant challenges, often requiring complex setups and weeks of development time.
The solution: Going with the flow
Integrating Grapevine Surveys with Shopify Flow removed the barriers that made it difficult to work with other apps. With this integration, they could allow merchants to automate and streamline their customer feedback processes in ways that were previously difficult to achieve. Here’s a closer look at how this integration works and the value it brings:
Automated responses: With Grapevine Surveys's Flow integration, merchants can automatically send follow-up emails or notifications whenever a trigger (an action) is fired. In this case, that’s when a customer completes a survey. This means that merchants can engage their customers immediately, thanking them for their feedback or offering a discount based on their survey responses.
Real-time notifications: Using integrations available in Flow, merchants can set up notifications through Slack or email whenever a survey response is submitted. This real-time feedback loop allows teams to quickly address any concerns or capitalize on positive feedback, enhancing customer satisfaction.
Data-driven decisions: By integrating survey responses with Google Sheets, merchants can easily visualize trends over time. This allows them to analyze which marketing channels are most effective, understand customer sentiment, and make informed decisions about their business strategies.
Custom workflows: The triggers can be used to create customized workflows tailored to specific business needs. For example, if a customer rates their experience poorly, a workflow can automatically alert the support team to follow up and resolve the issue, ensuring that no customer concern goes unnoticed.
Enhanced customer segmentation: Merchants can segment customers based on their survey responses. This means they can tailor their marketing efforts, sending targeted campaigns to those who have shown interest in specific products or services.
By integrating with Shopify Flow, Grapevine Surveys has transformed from a simple survey tool into a powerful part of a merchant's customer engagement strategy. By using these types of automations, merchants can take a more responsive and data-informed approach to customer feedback.
Building with Flow
Building Flow trigger extensions for Grapevine Surveys was simple for the Union Works team, especially since they had experience with similar features in other apps. To set this up, they used the command line interface (CLI).
The team identified three key triggers for Grapevine Surveys:
- Response Started: This fires when someone begins the survey, meaning at least one question has been answered.
- Question Answered: This triggers every time a question is answered, capturing both the question and the respondent’s answer.
- Response Completed: This fires when the last question is answered, providing a complete overview of all questions and answers—perfect for workflows that need conditional logic.
These triggers allow merchants to track survey completion rates and automate workflows in real-time. For example, if a customer submits a survey with a low Net Promoter Score (NPS), the customer service team can receive a Slack notification to reach out and resolve any issues.
The results: Simplifying operations
Integrating Grapevine Surveys with Shopify Flow has opened up new opportunities for Union Works. It simplifies technical relationships and helps their small team maximize their time. By using Flow, they can focus on developing their apps while allowing merchants to automate workflows based on survey data.
As Shopify Flow continues to grow, Union Works is thrilled to see more merchants using it to connect their systems. One feature they’re particularly excited about is the potential to send variable values from the Shopify platform into Shopify Email for use as merge fields in templates, enhancing integration capabilities even further.
Words of wisdom
Union Works has proven that building for Shopify Flow enhances the value of your app and makes it a vital tool for merchants looking to automate and improve their business processes. Developers can create effective solutions that help merchants succeed by offering streamlined workflows, customization, better integration, improved customer experiences, and scalability.
Looking to integrate your own app with Shopify Flow? To streamline development, the Union Works team recommends using the CLI to manage Flow triggers. They also suggest using the complex data schema to pass in arrays and structured data, enabling more advanced workflows based on survey responses. Check out more tips and tactics for integrating your app with Flow in the Shopify Developer docs.
Build for Flow
Union Works' journey with Grapevine Surveys and its integration with Shopify Flow showcases how a small team can innovate and adapt to meet merchant needs. By harnessing the power of Flow, Union Works can focus on building better apps and rely on Flow for integration and automation capabilities across Shopify and other apps.
