Frequently Asked Questions

How Does This Work?

On your home page, you create the questions that you want answered on a daily basis, and assign those questions to any member of your team or organization, or even to yourself, to answer.

Using the Alexa skill, you'll then be able to ask for your update for any day, and Alexa will read back your responses with the data provided by your team to give you your custom update for each of your questions. You can use this to have Alexa report to you on just about anything you can imagine.

Answering questions can be done in one of three ways:

The Question field:

The purpose of this field is simply to convey to the question responder what it is that you want to know. The question itself will not be included in Alexa's response when you ask for your update.

The Response field:

This field provides context in your update (what Alexa will say to you) for the generally very short answer to your question. If your questions are, for example, "How many sales did we have today?" and "How many service calls were there today?", when you ask 7Sigma for your update, you may want Alexa to say something along the lines of "Today, we had 42 total sales and 21 service calls."

To accomplish this, you'd set your responses for those two questions to "Today, we had _X_ total sales" and "and _X_ service calls." The "_X_" is simply a placeholder for the answers that will be submitted ("42" and "21" in this example).

The Response Type field:

This indicates how you expect the question responder to answer your questions. The "API" option informs the responder that you've asked them a question and directs them to our API Documentation, while the "Email" option will send the responder an Email message every day asking them to reply with the answer. With either option, responders may also login to this site to answer questions.

The Time field:

This is the approximate time of day, each day, that you want your question to be answered. This is also the time of day that any Email messages will be sent to the "Email" response type questions.

The Responder Email field:

This is the email address of the person who will answer your question. You may want to set this to your own email address, if you intend to automate answering your questions with your own scripts, or you can set this to the email address of another person in your team or organization who can answer your question.

Why Aren't My Emailed Answers Getting Through?

When you reply to an email asking for your answer, you must enclose the answer with brackets and underscores so we can find it. So if your answer is "42", your email reply must contain: {_42_}

You are also required to reply from the email address that the email was sent to.

Why Does Alexa Say "No Data"?

The "No Data" response indicates that your question has not been answered yet, or has not been answered recently. It's meant to indicate that you should check in on the people or scripts that should be answering your questions.

Can I Change the Order My Questions Are In?

Yes! The questions on your home page can be dragged and dropped into a new sort order. This also changes the order in which Alexa will read back your responses.

I'm Having Trouble Registering and/or Logging In.

In order to successfully register and activate your account, you need to verify your Email with us. If you have very aggressive spam prevention software, you may need to whitelist *@7sigma.com in order to receive the Email we send with the verification link.

If clicking on the link in the verification email does not work, you may need to copy and paste it into your browser's address bar.

If you missed the verification email, or you've forgotten your password, there are links on the Login page to resend the verification email and/or to reset your password.