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Smile supports rewarding customers for a variety of standard actions (like placing an order or sharing via social channels), but you can also define custom actions (activity types) that are unique to your brand or setup. Custom activity types represent the brand-specific actions that your program is able to issue rewards for.
Feature availability: Custom actions are available on Plus and Enterprise plans.
Common custom activity types include:
  • Subscribe to our newsletter
  • Enter a code from a physical product
  • Watch a video
  • Upload a receipt
  • Fill out a survey
  • Scan a QR code
  • Vote on a new product idea
Custom activity types are useful when you want to reward actions that happen outside of Smile and confirm that the action was completed. For example, you might reward customers for filling out a survey, uploading a receipt, or entering a code from a product. If you only want to reward customers for clicking a link to an external page (without tracking whether the action was completed), you can use the Click a link earning action instead.

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What you need to know

Rewarding for custom actions requires writing code as well as an understanding of Smile’s rewards architecture. For technical implementation guidance, we recommend sharing our fundamentals guide as well as our guide on rewarding for any action with your developer or agency partner.
Note: Smile’s team is able to help answer questions about creating, editing, and deleting custom activity types as well as setting up related ways to earn, but unfortunately we can’t help you with API development.

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Add a new custom activity type

To create a new custom activity type:
  1. In Smile Admin, navigate to Settings > Developer tools.
  2. In the Custom activities card, click Create new activity type.
  3. Fill in the Name before completed and Name after completed fields.
  4. If you would like all Smile surfaces (e.g. the rewards panel, customer accounts page, etc) to directly link the customer to where they can complete the described action, check off Include a call to action and complete the fields.
  5. Click Create.
After creating a custom activity type, you must also: If either of these is missing, customers won’t be issued points for completing the new activity type.
Warning: Including a call to action does NOT automatically trigger a reward for the customer when the action is clicked. Regardless of whether a call to action is included, you must still use Smile’s REST API or JavaScript SDK to notify Smile when the action occurs, otherwise rewards will not be issued.

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Edit a custom activity type

To edit an existing custom activity type:
  1. In Smile Admin, navigate to Settings > Developer tools.
  2. In the Custom activities card, locate the activity type that you wish to edit.
  3. Beside the activity type you wish to modify, click the edit icon.
  4. Make the desired changes to the activity type.
  5. Click Update.

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Delete a custom activity type

Before deleting a custom activity type, you must remove any ways to earn that rely on the activity type. If you try to delete an activity type that is being used by a way to earn, you’ll receive an error. Once you’ve confirmed the activity type is no longer in use:
  1. In Smile Admin, navigate to Settings > Developer tools.
  2. In the Custom activities card, locate the activity type that you wish to delete.
  3. Beside the activity type you wish to remove, click the delete icon.
  4. Type the full name of the activity type and click Permanently delete.
Caution: Once an activity type is deleted, any API calls to notify Smile that the activity has occurred will begin failing. Be sure to update any systems sending activities to Smile before deleting the activity type itself.