Have you ever wondered how to maximise the Experience Profile dashboard in Sitecore?

By using Web Forms for Marketers aka WFFM you can use forms on your website to capture data about a visitor and attach it to their profile.  For example, you can use a Contact Us form on the website to capture the name, email, gender, phone number, location, and more. With WFFM you can then add the user to Engagement Plans or EXM email mailing lists.

The scope of this post is how to capture the info from a form. Create your form with fields for the information you want to capture. Having the users name and email would be the bare minimum you would want to capture.

From there you will want to add the following Save Actions to the form, to run when the user clicks submit.

It is important to note that there are three places that information is kept about users; Login account, User Profile, and Contact Details. All three need to be updated with Save Actions.

Select Actions from the dropdown list and click Add; add them in this order:

1) Create User

Creates a user in Sitecore, allowing you to assign a username, password, and domain. I’d recommend using Email as the username (as this is the most unique info you will get), randomly generating the password, and using the extranet domain.

This all gets done under the hood so that user doesn’t even realise they have an account created.

The second tab on this screen is used to edit the User Profile details.

There actually two fields for Name in the User Profile (Full Name and Name). I’d suggest using a single field for the users name and assign this to both.

2)      User Login

This step then actually logs in the user and associates their visitor cookie with this user account.

3)      Update Contact Details

 These are visitor details stored in xDB that you can customise.

 Out of the box you get the following:

-          First name
-          Middle name
-          Surname
-          Title
-          Suffix
-          Nickname
-          Birth date
-          Gender
-          Job title
-          Address details
-          Email address
-          Email bounce count
-          Phone Numbers
-          Picture
-          Communication Preferences (i.e. Revoked permissions)
-          Language
-          Social Profile

This is where you can store additional fields from your form into xDB. There are a few guides online on how to do this, this one seems to be the most recent: https://sitecorehacker.com/2016/09/03/creating-custom-sitecore-xdb-contact-facets/

4)      Send Email Message (Optional)

Its best practice to send an email to the user that you have received their submission.

5)      Logout

Once you’ve associated the login with the Profile there’s no need to keep the user logged in.

This all looks like this:

Keep in mind that WFFM is being deprecated in Sitecore 8.4 and replaced with the new Sitecore Forms. A new API for working with xDB called xConnect is also coming which should improve the way you can setup custom details about visitors.

I’ll blog about the same functionality once I get my hands on it.