How to customize surveys

Although surveys have been provided with out-of-the-box questions textual questions, you can customize your surveys as required. This topic provides information about customizing your surveys.

Before you begin

Before adding questions to your survey, identify the metrics that you want to measure and draft the questions as per your requirement.

You must add your questions as fields in the Survey object. BMC recommends that you add questions in the Help Text field and use the Field Label field values to capture key metrics being measured by the survey (for example, client satisfaction, analyst effectiveness, and so on).

Using the Field Label field to save the key metrics enables you to review feedback against those metrics. To use the Help Text field values as questions, ensure that the Use Help Text values, not Field Label, as survey questions check box is selected on the Surveys page (Remedyforce Administration > Application Settings > Surveys).

The Help Text field enables you to save questions up to 255 characters. For more information, see configuring survey settings.

Considerations for adding slider type response survey questions

Note the following about slider type response survey questions:

• To show the slider bar with the answer on the survey, assign a default value to the Picklist type field that you have created for the question. If the default value is not given, then the slider appears only after the user clicks the colored section of the response bar.
• You can place the color legend on the survey page at the following positions:
  • Top
  • Bottom
  • Below each response
  These options are provided on the Remedyforce Administration > Application Settings > Surveys page. If the responses for all the questions are the same, you can select all the three options for the position of the legend. To ensure that the legend is displayed, select the position of the legend.
  
  Following is an example of a survey form with the legends displayed at the top and bottom of the slider type response survey questions section and below each response as well:
  
  
  
  If the responses for each question are different, only the Below each picklist option is enabled. Following is an example of a survey form with legends displayed below each response:
  
  

• Try and ensure that all slider type response survey questions have same number of responses. If the number varies, all questions show equal number of responses in the survey. This number is the smallest number of responses that you have added. All other responses are discarded. For example, How responsive was the Service Desk? (field1) has five responses, How would you rate the knowledge of the Service Desk Staff? (field2) has four responses, and How quickly was your issue resolved? (field3) has six responses, the slider bar is displayed with four colored sections for all questions, which is the minimum of all the responses.

• If all the slider type questions have same responses, the color legend can be configured to be displayed either at the top, bottom, or both the locations of the slider questions section. However, if all slider survey questions have different responses, the legend is displayed below each response.

• A maximum of 10 responses are supported.

• If you use the out-of-the-box questions provided for the Survey object, consider reordering the values to better fit the left to right style of the slider type response questions. You might want to either change the order of the responses or the colors as per your requirement. For example, the following table demonstrates the changed order of the responses:

  Default order	Suggested order
  Extremely responsive Very responsive Moderately responsive Slightly responsive Not responsive at all	Not responsive at all Slightly responsive Moderately responsive Very responsive Extremely responsive

You can view client feedback in the Dashboards tab. For more information, see Viewing survey reports.

The following video(6:09) shows how to customize a survey.

https://youtu.be/hYo-QSHYa_Q

Considerations for adding fields in a survey

• Rich Text Type field does not support image attachment.
• Field of type Formula are not supported in surveys.
• Lookup icon is not visible for a custom lookup field that is added on a survey form.
• The Date type field does not show the calendar and only selects the current date.

Adding questions to a survey

You can ask two types of question in a survey - slider type response survey questions and textual survey questions.

1. Navigate to Setup > Create > Objects.
2. In the Label column, click Survey.
3. On the Survey object page, in the Custom Fields & Relationships section, click New.

4. On the "Step 1. Choose the field type" page, select the type of field, and click Next.
   If you want to display your questions as slider type response survey questions, you must select Picklist type fields.

   Note

   Fields of type Text Area (Rich) and Formula are not supported in surveys.

5. On the "Step 2. Enter the details" page, perform the following actions:
   1. In the Field Label field, enter the metric on which you are measuring the response of the client.
      For example, Client Satisfaction.
   2. In the Help Text field, enter the question to display on the survey.
      For example, "Were you satisfied with the resolution provided by the agent?"

   3. Enter other required details, and click Next.

      Note

      Do not mark a field as required by using the Required check box. BMC recommends that you mark a field as required at the field set level. For more information, see Marking a field as required in a survey.

6. On the "Step 3. Establish field-level security" page, you do not need to make any change. On this page, click Next, and then on Step 4. Add to page layouts page, click Save.
7. To add a survey question, depending on the type of question you want to add, perform one of the following:
   
   • To add a textual survey question, on the Custom Object Survey page, in the Field Sets section, in the Action column for the Incident Survey or Service Request Survey field set, click Edit.
   • To add a slider type response survey question, click Edit in the Action column for the Incident Survey: Color Bar field set or Service Request Survey: Color Bar field set and click Edit. Additional steps are required to show slider type response questions. For more information, see
8. On the Incident Survey, Service Request Survey, Incident Survey: Color Bar, or Service Request Survey: Color Bar field set pages, click the question (the field) that you added and drag it to the In the Field Set list.
9. Click Save.
10. To provide field-level permissions to the custom questions that you have added, on the SelfService Profile page, in the Field-Level Security section, click View for Survey.
    1. Navigate to Setup > Develop > Sites.
    2. In the Site Label column, click SelfService.
    3. On the Site Details page, in the Site Visualforce Pages section, click Edit.
    4. To enable the Survey page to be viewed in Self Service, in the Available Visualforce Pages list, select BMCServiceDesk.SurveyPage and click the right arrow to move the page to the Enabled Visualforce Pages list.
    5. Click Save.
    6. On the Survey Field-Level Security for profile SelfService Profile page, click Edit.
    7. For the custom questions that you have added, select the Visible check box.
       This step enables clients to view the questions that you have added.
    8. Click Save.

If you add slider type response questions, you must perform additional configurations for the slider type response survey questions to be displayed on the survey form.

You can also mark a question as required on the survey form.

Additional configurations for slider type response survey questions

After you have added slider type response questions to the survey form, to be able to see the colors of your choice on the slider, you must perform some additional actions:

1. Click the Remedyforce Administration tab.
2. On the Home page, click the Application Settings tile, and from the menu select Surveys.
3. On the Surveys form, by default, colors are displayed next to each response. However, you have an option to select the color of your choice on the slider bar for each response value by clicking the color next to each response. You can also select the position of the legend.
   

   

4. Click Save .

Marking a field as required in a survey

You must mark a field as required at the field set level instead of the object level.

1. Navigate to Setup > Create > Objects.
2. In the Label column, click Survey.
3. On the Survey object page, in the Field Sets section, in the Action column for the Incident Survey or Service Request Survey field set, click Edit.
4. On the Incident Survey or Service Request Survey field set page, in the In the Field Set list, click .
5. In the Field Set Item Properties window, select the Required check box and click OK.
6. Click Save.

Removing out-of-the-box survey questions

If you do not want the out-of-the-box survey questions, you can remove them. To remove the out-of-the-box survey questions, you must remove the fields from the corresponding field sets on the Survey object.

1. Navigate to Setup > Create > Objects.
2. In the Label column, click Survey.
3. On the Survey object page, in the Field Sets section, in the Action column for the Incident Survey or Service Request Survey field set, click Edit.
4. Hover over the field that you want to remove and click . 
5. Repeat step 4 to remove all unwanted fields.
6. Click Save.

Configuring survey settings 

Survey settings enable you to manage surveys in a way that suits your business requirements.

1. Click the Remedyforce Administration tab.
2. On the Home page, click the Application Settings tile, and from the menu, select Surveys.

3. On the Surveys form, select the required settings described in the following table:

   Note

   Note the following points about surveys:

   • If you want to change the labels of these settings or the labels used on the Survey page (that is sent to the client), such label names are prefixed with survey.
   • If you add custom fields to the Survey object, you must update the feedback survey report to include the custom fields.

   
   

   Settings	Description
   Allow multiple respondents to respond to a survey link	Enables more than one user to submit survey for one incident or service request. For example, to enable an incident's client and the client's manager to respond to a survey, you must select this check box.
   If record is reopened, delete previously submitted survey responses	Deletes the survey responses that were submitted for a record before it was reopened. Previous survey responses are deleted when a new survey response is submitted after the record is reopened.
   Use Help Text values, not Field Label, as survey questions	Enables use of values in the Help Text fields of the Survey object as questions. You add questions to a survey as fields in the Survey object. This setting enables you to have a character limit of 255 characters for the survey questions. The Field Label field character limit is 40 characters. If you select this setting, you add questions in the Help Text field and key metrics in the Field Label field.
   For survey banner, use Self Service branding	Uses the branding configured for Self Service (on the Remedyforce Administration > Configure Self Service > Branding page) for the banner on the Survey page that is shown to the client. If a theme is assigned to an account and a client of that account opens a survey, the same theme is shown on the Survey page banner.
   Related Configuration pages	Provides links to all the configurations that are required to set up and send surveys to clients.
   Color Bar Configuration	Enables creating slider type response survey questions. To create such survey questions, you must add only Picklist type fields to the Incident Survey: Color Bar and Service Request Survey: Color Bar field sets of the Survey object. For more information about adding fields to field sets, see Customizing field sets.
   Previews	Displays the surveys in a preview window. If you have selected the For survey banner, use Self Service branding check box, the selected branding is not shown in the previews but applied on client survey page. Note: If you have a default input value for a picklist, a slider is displayed on the corresponding section of the slider bar.

4. Click Save.

Where to go from here

After customizing the survey, you can decide on the next step depending on your requirement. You can perform one or all of the following actions:

• Write a new workflow or update existing ones to send surveys to the required users and at a required time. For more information, see Configuring workflows or Salesforce Help.
• Create custom email templates or edit existing email templates and use those email templates with the workflows to send your custom message along with the survey links.
• Add custom reports to see reports on custom questions that you add.

Related topics

Overview of surveys

Configuring out-of-the-box surveys

Troubleshooting issues when configuring surveys

Viewing survey reports

Configuring workflows