Building and Using Surveys

By Madison Potter

Blog note: What’s one way to guarantee quality service and products? It’s having your customer’s feedback. Understanding the value of your customer’s feedback and utilizing their opinions for your improvement will best ensure that you meet their needs. As a customer-centered brand, GreenRope is dedicated to spreading this method and providing the necessary tools to help. Use our survey feature to find out useful opinions and related information from your contacts

What is a Survey 

Surveys are a great way for a company to get in front of their proposed target base to view their thoughts on upcoming or current products, customer service, and virtually any aspect of the business that directly affects your  consumer.

Agenda 

• When can we use a survey
• Importance of surveys and why we need them 
• How to create survey
• simulate and test out your completed survey before you send it out
• Different ways to send out your survey to ensure it reaches the right audience
• Tracking the survey responses, and organizing the data
• Walk you through this feature with a live demo
• End with a short Q&A session regarding our Survey feature. Please feel free to ask questions as we go along, but I will answer them all once I have completed the live demo and walked you through the GreenRopes Survey Feature

Benefits of Today’s webinar and Surveys 

• Use surveys to gain valuable insights about your customers
• Use surveys to gain valuable insights about your customers
• Use surveys to gain feedback about your business, product, or service
• Learn how to create surveys in GreenRope
• Learn how to track responses
• Discover how to automate and trigger workflows for advanced automation with GreenRope

Why Surveys? 

• Boost customer engagement: Conducting an email survey gives you a chance to interact and increase the level of engagement with your customers. 
• Insight into your overall performance: If you want to know how you are dong as a company, whether it’s your product, services, customer support, etc. Find out where you need to improve or where you’re doing an excellent job. 
• New business ideas! Looking for feedback on what your customers want? Ask them! They can be a good source for new ideas for products, services, webinar topics, content topics, etc. 
• Discover customer trends: Do you see a trend in your customers’ responses? Use surveys to identify key trends amongst your clients.
• Customer satisfaction: Plain and simple, are your customers satisfied? If not< what can you do to make their experience better? A survey is a great tool for obtaining valuable customer insights. 
• Client/customer retention and loyalty: When you show your customers you care about their feedback, you increase both retention and loyalty. Let your customers voice their opinion (just don't forget to acknowledge it). When they give you feedback, you give yourself an opportunity to ensure you are meeting their needs. 

Survey Steps: 

What is your purpose?

So before you start writing survey questions, ask yourself the big questions: What is the purpose of this survey? What do I hope to learn? How will the data I collect influence my decisions? 

And one of the most important questions you should ask is, “What is my target population?” By “target population,” we mean the people who you want to take your survey. When you know who’s going to take your survey, you can write your survey using language, examples, definitions (and more) that are specific to your population’s knowledge and needs. 

Understanding your consumer is key to every successful business. Without knowing who they are, what they want, and what they think, marketing your business may have proved pretty difficult. You need to understand and identify your target audience in which you intend to create this survey for. What is your purpose? 

• Market Research
• Customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Product feedback
• Employee engagement
• Event planning

 Asking the Right Questions

The key to acquiring the data you are searching for is all in the questions you ask. Here are a few tips to make sure you are developing and asking the right questions to get the best results.

1. Focus on customer loyalty rather than customer satisfaction. Instead of asking them whether they are satisfied in general, include a point of reference for them to compare you with. For example, when asking the customer about your customer service, is your service better, the same or lower than they would expect to receive elsewhere? This will give you a better idea of where you stand with the customer AND your competition.
2. Don’t seem biased. Ask questions that are neutral. Do not make it seem like you are leading your reader towards one answer or another. This will turn them off.
3. Make sure your questions are simple and clear. If you want people to respond, then make the questions easy to understand. If they have to put more energy than they are willing into answering your questions, they won’t. Keeping your questions simple and easy to respond to will get better results.
4. Include open-ended questions. Instead of just giving your respondent multiple choice questions, also allow them to give their own personal feedback. It is a place for them to get up on their soapbox and articulate exactly what they think, good or bad. You won’t always like what you hear, but this unstructured data proves quite relevant when you are trying to gain accurate feedback.
5. Don’t just send the survey; test it first. Send your survey around to a few different people. This will ensure that your questions are easy to understand. Why not get feedback on your quest for feedback?

Surveys are a great way for a business to determine where they stand among their customers. GreenRope offers the ability to easily create and track online surveys that you can email to all of your contacts. Once your survey has been sent out, don’t forget to track it! You can instantly track the results to analyze them and see how well your survey is performing. With the gathered data you are able to make the adjustments you need to help further grow your business.

Step 1: Survey Questions 

**The best surveys are also written in clear language and have unbiased questions. And when you’re smart about survey format and question flow, you avoid satisficers (people who don’t think carefully about their answer choices, rush through your survey, or misrepresent themselves). 

The first step is to create your survey questions. You can create new survey questions with the "New Survey Question" button on the right side of the page. You can also edit existing survey questions by clicking on the Question Code in the box on the left side of the page. 

note: once you click on questions/survey - will be displayed on the right side 

• “Update CRM with Answer” - this is useful if you are looking to collect more contact information, or if you are looking to have specific answers readily available for quick reference. This section will update fields within the “Edit Contact” page of your respondent. If you click the drop down menu, you can select from any of the standard contact information, or you can select a specific user defined data field that you are looking to update as well. User Defined Data fields can be made through “Settings” > “Group” > “UDF.”

Under the field “Update CRM with Answer” you can choose a system-generated or custom user-defined field to push the respondent’s answer to. By pushing the respondent’s survey answer into one of your contact fields, you will be able to search for that information and view it in their contact record later on. You can also choose to add the survey question respondent to a group and/or trigger a workflow.

• “Scoring survey?” - ties back to that user defined field, help to identify which leads or answers are more valuable to what you’re looking for. Useful for assessing performance, measuring learning, or gauging how far someone is along in a process, survey scores give you the ability to customize the user experience based on how a survey is answered.

• “Show results summary to respondents” - allows respondents to see feedback, it is also a per question basis, so you can customize what answers you would like to share. If this survey is for internal use, you don’t need to share the results with your respondents and just leave this field to the default of “no.” By selecting “Yes” this will display a summary chart of the responses on the thank-you page after the survey is submitted. 

• “Survey Question code” -  name of the question you’re asking, a helpful tip would be to relate it to the survey you’re wanting to add it into, and include a number of reference to the order you are looking to later add this question into your survey.

Helpful Hint: if you have more than one question in your survey give each one a similar code, example: “Test 1” (question 1), “Test 2” (question 2), “Test 3” (question 3), etc. This will make it easier to keep track of your different surveys and will make it easier to put all your questions in order when adding them to your survey. 

Question Types Available:

• Multiple Choice - the survey respondent may select one of the answers
• Checkbox - the respondent may select multiple answers
• Quality - the respondent selects a score from a range, from bad to good
• Available Times - each respondent selects the dates/times which will work for him or her
• Rank Order - the respondent orders the answers by his/her preference, 1 being the best
• Short Text - a one-line text field for the respondent to enter whatever he or she wants
• Text - a larger open text field for the respondent to enter whatever he or she wants

You can have you various answers in the corresponding boxes below, this is what will be the options available for the survey respondent to choose from. 

Question Field: In the “Question” field, you will type in your survey question. You can also upload an image to include as a part of the question. If the question is anything besides the text fields, you will enter in the answer selections in the different answer fields. If you have chosen to score your answers, you will place the point value next to each answer. 

Once you are finished creating your question, click on the “Save” button. After saving the question, a few more options will appear you can choose from. 

You can assign a point value per possible answer that you’ve created. This will allow you to give more meaningful answers higher values, and therefore be able to identify and target specific respondents. 

Once a question has been added to your survey, you can make it required to answer and/or add logic to it (example, if a respondent answers yes to the question, jump to the next question). Drag the questions up and down to place them in the correct order.  

By clicking on this “No Action” drop down menu, you can also assign a specific workflow to trigger once a respondent chooses this specific answer. For example, if the client’s interests are XXXX, then trigger workflow YYYY. This will also help you later on with automating your marketing efforts. 

If you would like to trigger specific actions on a per question basis, instead of a specific answer chosen, you can do this by scrolling to the bottom of your “edit Survey Questions” page.  Here,  you can (1) Add survey respondents to a particular group, or (2) assign a workflow to all survey responders based on answering this question.

Step 2: Create Survey Layout

Once you have created the questions you want, you then will create the survey. Click the "Create New Survey" button to do that. The questions you built will then be able to be added to that survey. 

Header: This will be the title of your survey, the first thing that your respondent will see when they open up your survey. For example, you can include your business logo here by adding a picture. 

Adding Questions: After you have created a survey or are editing an existing survey, you will see green "+" icons on the left side of the page, next to each question. Click the green "+" icon to add that question to your survey. 

Organize and add logic: Once you have added your questions, you can click and drag them to reorder them. This section allows certain questions to appear when previous questions are answered a certain way. This helps to keep your survey flow relevant to your respondent, and helps you collect only more purposeful information. You can make individual questions “Required” or “mandatory” for when willing out the survey. This will ensure that specific questions will be answered by your respondents, and not allow them to submit the survey without answering your question. 

More Design: This allows you to create or customize your Survey Submit button, or even add a brief text into the “Footer” section of your survey.

Upon Completion: Once the respondent submits the survey, you can have a custom message sent to the user, or even direct them to a specific URL. This could be your Thank you page for example.

The Upon Completion section allows you to customize the page seen by respondents after they have completed your survey. Create a thank you message or use the “Redirect to URL” to redirect them to a specific webpage or a custom HTML thank you page. You can also add scoring actions to your survey.

Add Scoring Action:

Remember we discussed earlier, how you can set questions in surveys to have scores associated with answers.

Choose whether you want the answers for this question scored. At the end of the survey, you can then specify what happens to the user after the survey is completed based on the respondent's score. This can be either a custom message or a custom webpage that the respondent is taken to.  You can also execute a workflow based on their score (see XXX help topic). One other option is the ability to have the score update one of the user-defined fields in the contact’s record (see “User-Defined Fields” help topic). Storing a survey respondent's score in their contact record allows you to recall their score at any time, as well as use their score in other applications like filtering emails sent to them.

This section allows you to set score breakpoints, and if someone's score falls within those breakpoints, the scoring rules you specify override the default Message to User and Redirect URL settings above.

In both the custom scoring URL and Thank You Message, you can use a to put the total number of points the survey responder earned. This allows you to personalize the URL or message received to show exactly their score.

In the Message to User area, if you want to display the survey results (charts of the answers given by all survey responders), add the message where you would like those to go.

You can automatically have the score be assigned to a contact's user field. This user field must be shared with all groups to be available as an option here.

Test your Survey Out!

But wait! Before you send your survey, take it for a test drive. Make sure your questions are clear and that skip logic, question randomization, and the overall design are in working order. You can (1) click on the “Actions” > “Simulate Survey” to test this out, (2) send your survey to a friend (3) even do a practice run with real respondents in your target population–for a smarter approach to collecting survey data.

If you want to simulate having one of your contacts fill out a survey, click Simulate Survey in the Action bar. This is a useful way to enter in survey data for someone you may be interviewing in person or on the phone.

Organization of Survey(s)

You can also organize your surveys into folders. Click the "New Folder" button to create your folder. You can rename and remove folders at any time. To add surveys to that folder, simply click and drag the survey into that folder.

Gathering organized data - specific to what you’re looking for, organized by questions you create. More data is always better than less data - only if it is organized.

How to Simulate a Survey

If you want to simulate having one of your contacts fill out a survey from within GreenRope, click Simulate Survey in the Action bar (found under Communicate > Surveys). This is a useful way to enter in survey data for someone you may be interviewing in person or on the phone.

When the dialog box opens, you will select wish survey you wish to simulate and type in the name or email address of the contact in the group you are currently in you wish to associate the survey results to. Once you click on the “Generate Link” button, you will be able to click on the “Open Simulated Survey” button and fill out the survey. 

Step 3: Send out Email Options

There are a few ways in which you can send out your survey: 

• Anonymous Polls Link/iFrame: You can set up a dedicated page for responding to your surveys with this link, or section.

This link can be found at the bottom of your specific survey (in Communicate > Survey > click to open the specific survey), and can be added to websites, emails, etc. With this method, the survey answers will come back anonymous and not be tied to the contacts in your CRM.

These surveys are generally untracked, meaning they're not correlated to specific contacts in your database, unless the contact has interacted with you before and you have their data in your Contacts area. If you do have the contact in your CRM, there is a chance we will be able to identify that contact when the survey is filled out.If not, when you look at your survey responses, those responses will be shown as by “Anonymous". 

You can take this link and put it on a website for anyone to fill out. If you want to put this survey question inside a webpage, you can also embed this inside of an iframe. To find out what the HTML for your specific survey will look like, click on the ? icon, and it will be located in the pop-up menu. Using the In the HTML in this section, you can specify height and width inside the iframe tag to constrain the size of the poll.

• Insert into Email broadcast by clicking on the “Survey” button located within the tool box. Click on “Communicate” > “Email,”  Here, open up your desired email, then select the “Survey” icon. You can select the specific survey you’re looking to insert, and edit the “Link Text.” Once you verify what your link will look like, click the  “Insert Survey Placeholder” to add this survey link to your email template.

Note: These surveys only work when sent by email (they will not work when you preview your email message).

You can also send out your survey through Communicate > Email, and inserting a survey placeholder in the body of that email. By sending out your survey this way, you can keep the survey answers tied to your CRM contacts. 

• Event RSVP (Survey your attendees for your event). By clicking on “Calendar”> “Events List,” select your event, and go to the “Event Details” page. Select on the “Settings” tab, and select your specific survey from within the “Survey Attendees:” section.

Once you have built your survey, you can include it on any email broadcast (use the Survey button in the email builder) or event RSVP (select the starting survey question in the event details area in the Calendar module).

Tracking Survey Results

After you have sent your survey, results are tabulated within the Survey main page. 

• Viewing Responses

In Communicate > Surveys, you can view the results for a survey or individual survey responses. 

• Access responses in the CRM record

• If a contact is already within your GreenRope data base and fills out a survey, their responses will be recorded within their CRM/Activities tab of their Edit Contact page. 
• Also, if you created the user defined field that has the survey score, you will be able to update, and locate that from within their Edit Contact page as well. 
• Within the Survey, if you chose the option to “Update CRM with Answer,” then you can also locate those additions within the contact’s CRM page.

• Automation associated with Survey Responses

Survey Scoring 

The survey builder allows you to add point values to specific questions/answers and then add scoring actions for when certain thresholds are met. To add scoring to your survey, go to Communicate > Surveys. 

Before

Scoring system - need to create a  user defined field (short text/open text field) that will capture the points 

• help with specific scoring of points and automated marketing elements
• “Survey Score” - “Short Text” field (keep track on customer’s edit contact page) 

You can also choose to have the score update a of the user-defined field in your account (see help article “User-Defined Fields” for information on how to create user-defined fields). Storing a survey respondent's score in the CRM allows you to recall their score at any time, as well as use their score in other applications like filtering emails sent to them and triggering workflows based on the field value changing.

During

For each survey question you build, you can decide whether or not to score the answers for that question. If you choose to score the answers, you will be able to place a point value for any of the specific answers. 

After

At the end of the survey, you can then specify what happens to the user after the survey is completed based on the respondent's score. This can be either a custom message or a custom webpage that the respondent is taken to.  You can also trigger a workflow based on their score (see help topic “Creating Workflows”).  

You can display a respondent's custom score by building the survey thank-you URL in the GreenRope system.  You will build a webpage, and in it you will use the Merge button to put the User##_Placeholder in the webpage (where ## is the user field number you specified as the score update user field previously).  Because we will be able to identify the webpage visitor as your survey respondent, we can show any profile information you would like.

 Conclusion:

When you take your customers’ feedback for change and improvement, you give them what they value the most – listening to them. Not only are you able to increase customer satisfaction, but you increase your brand reputation by letting your customers know that their opinions are important to you. You can never go wrong by showing your customers and partners that their opinions matter. It’s really a win-win situation for everyone!