Five things to be excited about in the new Cint Exchange API
Introduction
For those who don’t know me, I’m Wiley Davis. I lead Demand Integrations for North America here at Cint, which means that I’ve spent a lot of time staring at ResTech APIs for demand, supply, and everything in between.
Since you’re reading this on our shiny new Developer Portal, you’re probably aware that we’ve been working on a whole new set of APIs for the Cint Exchange (Cint X). We’ve taken the best parts of the Lucid Marketplace and Cint Buyer APIs and built a whole new experience to help you feed the world’s curiosity.
With this article, I wanted to take a step back and tell you about the things I’m most excited about in the Cint Exchange APIs.
The list
- Fielding assistant
- Real-time notifications
- In-field and bulk reconciliation
- Server-to-server respondent flow
- Asynchronous reports
Fielding assistant
Over the years, I’ve guided dozens of integrating customers through the arduous process of implementing automation for their surveys. There’s so much to check: quotas, pricing, conversion, and more. Often, systems compete with one another. Pricing automation is at odds with overfill prevention; quota management avoids difficult demographic lockups but comes at the cost of speed in field. The best approaches and algorithms require extensive development and delicate tuning, lest you end up with broken surveys or unexpected bills.
In the Cint Exchange, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We’ve built out a series of automation modules called the fielding assistant to do all of that automation for you.
They’re a core part of the target group. You can mix and match from goals and optimizations, and configure precise limits that match your business logic. The algorithms move as fast as our platform does, and the models have been trained on thousands of surveys and millions of completes.
Why I’m excited
No more algorithm tuning. No more endless polling for tiny quota updates. No more deadlock between strategies. As a bonus, setup via API is extremely simple - just configure the fielding_assistant module with as little as a true boolean and go. We’ll sort out the rest.
Real-time notifications
If you’re coming to Cint Exchange from the Cint Buyer API, this might not be all that exciting, but this is a huge step forward for Lucid Marketplace users.
In the Cint Exchange, we’ve added real-time webhook notifications for survey and respondent events. Instead of polling constantly to keep your quotas open or monitor when fielding assistant changes prices, you can configure a webhook subscription to signal the changes instead.
Why I’m excited
Did I mention that you don’t have to poll? Real-time updates mean that your surveys can be more effective. You can adapt faster and waste less sample. When a survey finishes, you know immediately, and your integration can react to handle next steps.
In-field and bulk reconciliation
Even with all the security improvements in the Cint Exchange and our constant efforts to combat survey fraud throughout our ecosystem, reconciliation is still a fact of life. Respondents get bored and enter gibberish, or just start answering ‘C’ to every question.
We’ve made it as easy as possible to deal with these scenarios - you can now reconcile live projects, with as few or as many IDs as you want. The Cint Exchange reconciliation APIs accept a lot more information too - the reason codes allow us to communicate with suppliers and tune our fraud prevention models, leading to better quality for you and for the entire Cint Exchange.
Why I’m excited
Our asynchronous process has come a long way here. We’re able to accept bigger, more complex reconciliations without all the challenges, overhead, and rate limits of our legacy systems. You don’t have to wait until the end of fielding, either. You can reconcile a live target group and have the quota counts update in real time, allowing you to field to replace more quickly.
Server-to-Server (S2S) respondent flow
Where would online market research be without the redirect? Who knows? The ubiquity and simplicity of redirects has served us well for years, transporting respondents and their data through time and space. But redirects have their flaws - they’re easy to exploit and manipulate, and signing/hashing approaches tend to be tricky and error-prone.
That’s why the first-choice option for respondent data transfer on the Cint Exchange is server-to-server (S2S). We’ve worked carefully to make the system as compatible as possible with the legacy Cint Access/BAPI solution, while updating the process for the Cint Exchange.
Every respondent still moves via a redirect, but their data is secured with server-to-server validation and update API requests. We’ve also updated our guidance and best practices to ensure that every respondent is checked for authenticity and eligibility on survey entry.
Why I’m excited
Anything that safeguards surveys and prevents ghost completes is always worth doing. Our server-to-server API means that we can protect against the vast majority of link manipulation, and ensure that every respondent that shows up at your survey platform is exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Asynchronous reports
By now, you might have guessed that the Cint Exchange APIs have a strong emphasis on asynchronicity. As our platform has grown in size, scale, and complexity, we’ve rolled out more ways to leverage asynchronous requests and queues. With the Cint Exchange APIs, that asynchronicity is coming to reports as well.
The shift to asynchronous generation means that we can programmatically offer extensive data about your account, aggregated into several different report formats. These reports are great for setting up automated workflows, such as Business Intelligence ingestion pipelines or end-of-month true-ups. You’re no longer limited to a single project or target group either; you can pull data across your entire account.
Why I’m excited
I can’t wait to see what people build with the reporting tools! This amount of data offers exciting ways to monitor and analyze performance across an integration or an entire account. From monitoring how your project managers set up work to a leaderboard for monthly completes, the reports available have a staggering amount of information, all delivered directly to your systems.
Conclusion
It was hard to narrow down my list to just the five features above, and I keep finding new features and improvements. Whether you’re upgrading an existing integration or developing something brand new, I’m sure you’ll find Cint Exchange features that open up possibilities and make your research process better.
- Wiley Davis (Team Leader, Demand Integrations)