Importing your customer list

Importing a customer list is how you start collecting feedback from people who’d never have left a review on their own — which is most of them.

Before you import: the consent question

You need a lawful basis for contacting these people. In practice that means they’re your customers and they’d expect to hear from you.

Fine: people who bought from you, stayed with you, booked with you, or asked to be contacted.

Not fine: a purchased list, scraped addresses, or contacts from a business you acquired without checking what they consented to.

This isn’t just legal caution — surveying people who don’t recognise you produces spam complaints, which damages your ability to reach the customers who do want to hear from you.

→ Privacy and your data

Prepare your file

A CSV with one row per customer. Useful columns:

Column	Needed?	Notes
Email	Yes, usually	The main delivery channel
First name	Recommended	Personalisation measurably lifts response rates
Last name	Optional
Phone	Optional	For SMS where available
Date of visit / purchase	Recommended	Lets you time surveys properly
Location / branch	If multi-site	Essential for per-location reporting
Group	Optional	Assigns to a response group

Clean it first

Ten minutes here saves a lot of mess later:

• Remove duplicates. Two rows for one person means two surveys, which is the fastest way to annoy someone.
• Remove obviously dead addresses. Typos, [email protected], old internal addresses.
• Check date formats are consistent. Mixed formats import badly.
• Remove staff and internal addresses. Surveying your own team skews everything.
• Confirm the encoding is UTF-8 if you have accented names — otherwise they arrive mangled, and a survey addressed to “José” does more harm than no name at all.

Import

Upload the file and map your columns to the fields FeedbackRobot expects. The mapping step is where import problems get caught, so read it rather than clicking through.

Import a small test batch first — ten rows — and check they look right before doing the whole list.

After importing

Customers are available to survey immediately. You can assign them to response groups for targeting.

Don’t survey everyone at once. A single blast to a large list produces a spike of responses you won’t work through, and burns the goodwill of people you could have asked at a better moment. Send in batches tied to when they actually visited.

Keeping the list current

A one-off import goes stale. If your customers live in another system, connect it directly so new customers arrive automatically:

• Shopify · Stripe · Salesforce · Cin7 · Amadeus · Delphi