Using Actions Tasks to Build ETL Workflows
What's on This Page:
About Using Actions Tasks to Build ETL Workflows
The Qualtrics Actions platform contains a series of tasks to assist in importing data from third-party destinations into Qualtrics or exporting data from Qualtrics to third-party destinations. These tasks follow the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) framework. Using ETL tasks, you can create automated and scheduled workflows to bring data from third-party sources into Qualtrics as well as export data from Qualtrics to third-party destinations.
To create an ETL Workflow, you must create one or more extractor tasks and exactly one loader task. If you are looking to load data into multiple destinations, you should create separate workflows for each destination.
General Setup for Extractor and Loader Tasks
- From the Actions page, create a new scheduled or event-based action. This action will trigger based on the criteria you set.
- The first task of your action should be your data extractor task. These tasks import data from an external source to Qualtrics. See available extractor tasks for more information about each available task
- The second task of your action should be your data loader task. These tasks tell Qualtrics where to save your imported data. See available loader tasks for more information.
- This step is optional, but useful for alerting you if something goes wrong. Use action notifications to get notified if the workflow ever fails.

Available Extractor Tasks
At this time, the following tasks are available for importing data into Qualtrics:
- Extract data from SFTP files task: Extract data from your SFTP server and import it into Qualtrics.
- Extract data from salesforce Task: Extract data from your Salesforce instance and import it into Qualtrics.
Available Loader Tasks
At this time, the following tasks are available for loading data into Qualtrics:
- Load data into XM Directory task: Save imported data to your XM Directory.
Troubleshooting Data Extracting and Loading Tasks
Incomplete Actions
Data extractor and loader tasks must be used together. If you are missing a piece of their setup, the actions editor will alert you.


Actions Failing
If your tasks are failing or not firing properly, the first place you should look is Actions reporting & history. This will contain information about every time your action fired and the results of that action.
In reporting & history, each piece of your action will have its own entry, making it easy to pinpoint where things went wrong.

After identifying the problem, you can click View under Details to see more information to help you diagnose how to fix the problem. This will pull up the JSON payload for the task. Scroll down to the Task Output section to find any errors.

After editing your action and fixing the problem, you can return to reporting & history and click Retry to rerun the action.
Specific Use Cases
Check out the following pages for specific use cases and action setups.
- B2B Command Center (CX): Import B2B data from Salesforce and save that data in your XM Directory to help understand your customer relationships.