Customer feedback loses value every minute it sits in a silo. When Delighted survey responses don’t reach your CRM, support desk, and analytics stack in near real time, detractor signals go unaddressed, promoters aren’t mobilized, and insight cycles stretch from minutes to days. The core issue isn’t the data—it’s the delivery pattern.
A webhook-first approach solves the timing problem. Instead of polling for changes, the source pushes events the moment they occur—a model explained in webhook fundamentals. Where teams often stall is the “last mile”: validating signed requests, building queue-first receivers, handling retries and DLQs, flattening JSON, enriching from CRMs, and wiring monitoring. Integrate.io turns that into configuration instead of code, with managed endpoints, low-code transformations, and observable pipelines that deliver Delighted responses where your teams work.
Key Takeaways
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Push for “what just happened,” pull for history. Use Delighted webhooks for live signals and complement with CDC capabilities or targeted REST/API pulls for backfills and reconciliation—so you keep both freshness and completeness.
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Supported Delighted events with downstream control. Work with Delighted response and unsubscribe webhooks, and apply score/segment filtering in your receiver or ETL (provider-side score filtering is not documented).
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Low-code transformations at scale. Map and reshape payloads with the ETL function library (200+ helpers for JSON flattening, date/number normalization, joins, conditional routes).
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Security by design, aligned to docs. Validate HMAC signatures per Delighted’s webhook reference; harden receivers following production webhook best practices and secure webhook authentication.
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Operational visibility to stay ahead of issues. Track latency, errors, queue depth, schema drift, and freshness with data observability to catch problems before customers notice.
What Is a Webhook and How It Works (Delighted Context)
A webhook is a push callback: when a defined event occurs, the source sends an HTTPS POST with a structured payload to your endpoint, a pattern documented in Stripe webhooks. Providers standardize HMAC signatures so receivers can verify integrity, as shown in HMAC signatures and secure webhooks for GitHub.
In Delighted, survey responses and opt-outs arrive as Delighted webhook events. Payloads include response attributes and identifiers; when additional fields are needed, enrich with API calls via the REST connector pattern. This push model reduces polling and lowers time-to-awareness for CX workflows.
Webhook vs API (and why you’ll use both)
Polling asks “anything new?” at intervals; pushes arrive only when something changes, which webhook fundamentals show is more efficient and timely. In practice:
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Use webhooks for immediate signals (detractor alerts, unsubscribe propagation).
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Use CDC or targeted REST pulls for historical loads, backfills, and reconciliation.
This hybrid pattern makes your pipelines both fast and complete.
Why Real-Time Feedback Integration Matters
Feedback is most actionable the moment it’s submitted. Push-based delivery lets you:
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Recover detractors quickly — Open tickets and notify owners as soon as a low score arrives, aligned with the queue-first designs in webhook best practices.
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Activate promoters — Trigger referral and review flows minutes after high scores come in.
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Inform product decisions — Stream comments into analytics using the Snowflake webhook pattern so trend dashboards reflect what just happened, not last week’s batch.
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Stay compliant — Process opt-outs promptly via Delighted’s unsubscribe events and keep audit trails in observability.
Use Cases That Pay Off Fast
Real-time service recovery
Route detractor scores to support with account context and last-purchase data. Keep score filters and routing logic downstream (Delighted dispatches by event type, not by score threshold per Delighted webhooks overview).
Customer journey analytics
Join feedback with CRM segments, product usage metrics, and transaction history; land into a warehouse using the Snowflake integration approach for cohorting and longitudinal sentiment.
Marketing activation
Enroll promoters into advocacy flows; gate high-touch asks (references, case studies) based on response freshness—implemented as branches in the ETL function library.
Compliance assurance
Propagate opt-outs immediately and document propagation with data observability alerts and logs.
Fan-out from a single source
Send the same event to multiple targets with per-destination transforms via ETL—warehouse, CRM, helpdesk, marketing, and Slack notifications.
Prerequisites
Delighted
Admin access to configure webhooks, with payload and header details validated against Delighted’s API webhooks reference.
Destinations
Credentials for Snowflake/BigQuery/CRMs/helpdesks; target schemas for responses and derived attributes.
Security
HTTPS receivers with HMAC verification exactly as described in Delighted’s HMAC docs; if your firewall enforces egress controls, consult the current IP guidance in Delighted’s webhook article (avoid hard-coding legacy IPs).
Runbooks
Retention and replay policies, alert thresholds, incident workflows, and score-based routing rules per production best practices.
Implementation tip: Some storefront/app stacks ask for a URL placement step. Guides like Mesa’s Delighted connection show common entry points. Keep your authentication aligned with HMAC best practices.
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Choose event types — Responses and unsubscribes in the Delighted UI per webhooks overview.
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Add endpoint — Use your Integrate.io receiver from webhook integrations.
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Authenticate — Validate signatures from headers using the signing secret following Delighted’s API reference.
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Test — Send sample deliveries; acknowledge quickly using the queue-first pattern in webhook best practices.
Timeouts vary by provider. Acknowledge promptly and process asynchronously to avoid duplicate deliveries—this is core to apply webhook best practices.
Set Up Integrate.io to Receive Delighted
Create the source and inspect payloads
Provision a managed HTTPS receiver in webhook integrations. Use test deliveries to confirm header names and JSON structure exactly as in Delighted’s API examples.
Map and transform (low-code)
Use the ETL function library to:
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Map score → segment (Detractor/Passive/Promoter).
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Convert ISO 8601 strings → database datetime.
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Extract nested follow-ups and custom properties via JSON flattening.
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Enrich with account metadata using the REST connector pattern (e.g., CRM lookups).
Branch by content:
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Route detractors to helpdesk + owner alerts.
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Route promoters to marketing automation.
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Land every response to the warehouse for analytics.
Keep validation strict: confirm required IDs, coerce numeric scores, and quarantine invalids—guardrails consistent with apply webhook best practices.
Typical transformations
Type safety — Convert 0–10 scores to numeric, standardize booleans, sanitize strings.
Flattening — Expand nested arrays/objects (additional questions, properties) into relational columns.
Null handling — Default optional fields; tag incomplete responses.
Idempotency — Webhooks are at-least-once; dedupe using stable identifiers and/or deterministic hashes (retry/dedupe norms in webhook best practices).
Multi-destination patterns
Warehouse — Bulk load to Snowflake/BigQuery using the Snowflake webhook pattern for cohorting, NPS distributions, and retention analysis.
CRM — Update contacts/accounts with latest score, comment, and segment (connector details on the Salesforce page).
Support — Create tickets in Zendesk/Freshdesk via webhook destinations for service recovery.
Marketing — Trigger nurture/referral sequences based on promoter status.
Team notifications — Post formatted summaries to Slack with direct links to the right account records.
Real-Time + CDC for Continuous Feedback
Replication-style needs can leverage CDC capabilities to keep targets current while webhooks deliver live responses. Design receivers with:
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Queue-first acknowledgment — Accept, verify, enqueue, then process async (pattern in best practices).
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Priority tiers — Fast lanes for detractors, standard lanes for others.
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Auto-schema — When Delighted adds fields, mappings adapt via the ETL toolset without breaking existing flows.
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Stateful checkpoints — Track what’s landed in each destination to ensure exactly-once outcomes downstream even with at-least-once deliveries upstream.
Security & Compliance
Verify the sender and harden the path
Validate signatures from headers using your webhook signing secret as described in Delighted’s HMAC docs. Add secure headers and perform routine secret rotation consistent with production best practices; for vendor URL placements, follow authentication guidance.
If your network requires allowlists, follow the current IP guidance in Delighted’s webhook article; avoid publishing or hard-coding legacy single IPs since ranges can change.
Encrypt and control access
All transport is over TLS 1.2+. Pipelines process data transiently with metadata/logging for reliability; scope access with RBAC and audit trails per Integrate.io security (SOC 2 Type II attestation; features that help customers support GDPR/CCPA; HIPAA scenarios require a BAA and appropriate configuration).
Data handling and retention clarity
Document retention for queues, DLQs, and logs in your runbooks and align with policy. If you need field-level handling or customer-managed keys, review options with your account team and confirm against security documentation rather than relying on generalized claims.
Monitoring, Retries, and DLQs
Use data observability to watch:
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Success/error rates — Identify auth failures, schema mismatches, and destination issues.
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End-to-end latency — Track P50/P95 to protect time-sensitive flows (targets vary by workload).
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Queue depth — Often the earliest predictor of trouble, emphasized in webhook best practices.
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Freshness — Alert when dashboards or CRM updates lag your target thresholds.
Retries should follow exponential backoff with jitter; when retries exhaust, move items to DLQs for replay—resilience patterns detailed in apply webhook best practices. Treat DLQ depth as a first-class SLO and rotate keys and secrets under change control with correlated alerts.
Troubleshooting (Symptoms → Checks → Fixes)
Webhooks not arriving
Checks — HTTPS reachability; signature mismatch; rotated secret not updated; firewall blocking Delighted egress.
Fixes — Validate headers and signature steps per Delighted API; rotate and re-apply secrets; update allowlists using current guidance in Delighted’s webhook article; confirm your endpoint returns a 2xx quickly (queue-first).
Schema errors
Checks — New fields, changed nesting, optional fields now missing.
Fixes — Refresh payload samples; adjust mappings; adopt flexible landing and flattening in ETL; keep a raw payload column for forensics.
Duplicates
Checks — At-least-once retries or replays.
Fixes — Use stable identifiers and/or deterministic hashes to enforce idempotency; see norms in webhook best practices.
Destination throttling/timeouts
Checks — 429s; pool exhaustion; slow downstream writes.
Fixes — Queue-first acknowledgment, adaptive backoff, and micro-batch windows; pace API calls with the REST connector pattern; tune connection pools and parallelism caps.
Clock skew/signature windows
Checks — Timestamps in headers compared to receiver time.
Fixes — Allow reasonable skew per Delighted’s API reference; synchronize clocks (NTP) on your edge and workers.
Advanced: Blending Delighted with Other Data Sources
Customer 360
Join feedback with CRM deals, support history, and product telemetry to build holistic views using multi-source pipelines. Use consistent keys, apply late-arriving dimension handling, and preserve canonical customer identifiers.
Journey orchestration
Combine Delighted events with ecommerce, marketing, and support streams to drive next-best actions—real-time segmentation and playbooks, wired through ETL branches. Persist journey state in your warehouse and push segments outward via Reverse ETL.
Score-aware enrichment
Use the REST connector pattern to fetch complementary details (e.g., CRM tier, ARR band, renewal date) and embed escalation policies: detractors in top revenue bands trigger human follow-up, while passives automatically receive tailored education sequences.
Warehouse-forwarded personalization
Materialize segments based on rolling NPS/CSAT, product adoption thresholds, and recent ticket sentiment, then synchronize to activation platforms via Reverse ETL—so outreach reflects current reality rather than static lists.
Putting It All Together: Reference Architecture
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Delighted → Receiver
Delighted sends response/unsubscribe events over HTTPS; receiver validates signatures per Delighted’s API and acknowledges quickly (best practices).
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Queue-first buffer
Minimal validation; enqueue for durable processing (retention governed by policy; see security for handling expectations).
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Transform & branch
Flatten payloads, coerce types, enrich via REST connector pattern, then branch in ETL: warehouse, CRM, support, marketing, Slack.
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Observability & SLOs
Monitor success %, P50/P95 latency, queue depth, and freshness via data observability; alert on drift and DLQ growth.
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Backfill & reconcile
Use CDC / REST pulls for historical data and reconciliation; keep exactly-once outcomes at the destination through idempotent keys.
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Closed loop
Push enriched segments and outcomes back to activation tools with Reverse ETL; keep surveys targeted and contextual.
Moving Delighted data in real time doesn’t have to mean months of custom code. With Integrate.io, you get managed receivers, HMAC-verified requests, low-code transforms, and observable operations—so detractor alerts, promoter programs, and product insights flow as soon as customers speak up.
Explore Delighted’s events in the webhook overview, design resilient receivers with webhook best practices, and stand up pipelines through webhook integrations. For historical completeness and ongoing sync, add CDC—and keep insight cycles measured in minutes, not days.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Integrate.io validate Delighted webhooks?
The receiver validates signatures from headers using your signing secret before any processing, following Delighted’s webhook reference. Additional hardening (secure headers, secret rotation, structured logging) follows production best practices and authentication guidelines.
What if my destination is down?
Events are acknowledged, queued, and retried with backoff (and jitter); when retries exhaust, items go to DLQs for replay—resilience patterns documented in apply webhook best practices. Treat DLQ depth and freshness as alertable metrics in data observability.
Can pipelines handle custom properties and follow-ups?
Yes. Payload discovery and JSON flattening in the ETL toolset handle nested structures and optional fields; mappings adapt when new attributes appear. Use the REST connector pattern to enrich with CRM details.
Do I still need polling after enabling webhooks?
Use webhooks for immediate signals, and complement with CDC or targeted REST pulls for backfills and reconciliation—per webhook fundamentals.
Any tips for storefront/app setups?
When third-party tools request a URL, follow their integration guides (e.g., Mesa’s Delighted connection) and keep signature checks aligned with HMAC best practices.
