Overview of surveys

BMC Remedyforce helps you manage and track the incidents and service requests raised by your clients. Service desks have key goals, and BMC Remedyforce enables you to measure your key goals by using surveys as one of the methods.

BMC Remedyforce enables you to run surveys to capture incident and service request feedback from clients. Out-of-the-box, you can send surveys to clients after an incident or service request is closed. You can set up distribution and scheduling options by configuring custom workflows and triggers. Surveys and reports that are derived from these surveys help you measure your performance and identify improvements to help achieve your goals. You can configure one survey for incidents and one survey for service requests.

The following topics are provided:

Types of survey questions

Your survey questions can be a combination of textual and slider type response questions. The slider type response questions section is always displayed at the top of the survey followed by the textual questions. Depending upon the type of questions and their responses, you can select the position of the legend. The following list describes the type of survey questions in detail:

Textual questions—Use fields of various types such as Check Box, Text Area, and Picklist as responses to the question.
Following is an example of a textual question:
Slider type response questions—Use a slider with a different color bar for each response option of a question. By default, certain colors are defined for such questions. However, you can change those colors to suit your requirement.
Following is an example of slider type response questions:

How are surveys implemented

To implement surveys, the following components are used:

Survey object—Fields and field sets of the Survey object are used to create the survey questions and their possible responses. Survey question text is added as the Help Text value of a field because this field allows adding questions of up to 255 characters. The following field sets are provided:
- Incident Survey and Service Request Survey—For all textual questions.
- Incident Survey: Color Bar and Service Request Survey: Color Bar—For all slider type response questions.
Workflows—The out-of-the-box workflows enable you to send the survey link to all the clients for whom an incident or service request is closed. You can also create custom workflows to send an email message with a survey link at a different time.
Email templates—You can use the Incident Survey and Service Request Survey email templates to send the link survey link when an incident or service request is closed.
Settings to customize a survey—On the Remedyforce Administration > Application Settings > Surveys page, you can configure the survey settings, such as whether to allow multiple respondents to respond to a survey link or whether to delete previously submitted survey responses if a record is reopened. For more information, see To configure survey settings.
The following figure displays how surveys are implemented in BMC Remedyforce:

Guidelines to build a survey

Following are the step-by-step guidelines that help you build a survey:

Determine the goals of your service desk.
Determine the metrics that help you measure success of these goals. For example, if lower mean time to repair (MTTR) is one of your business goals, a metric to track would be response time of the assigned staff member.
After making a list of your business goals and related metrics, look at the default questions provided in the Survey object.
If the default questions cover your business goals, you could use the out-of-the-box surveys. If you need to measure more metrics, you must add custom questions to the survey. You can also remove default questions from the survey.
Also decide if you want to have textual, slider type response, or both types of questions in your survey.
Identify the audience to whom you want to send the survey. The out-of-the-box workflows enable you to send the survey link to all the clients for whom an incident or service request is closed. If you want to send surveys to clients belonging to an account or some specific clients (such as client managers), you must configure the required rule criteria used in workflows to send surveys to the required audience.
Determine when do you want to send the survey to clients. The out-of-the-box workflows enable you to send the survey link whenever an incident or service request is closed. If you want to send the survey link whenever a different criteria is met, you must configure the required rule criteria used in workflows.

Survey behavior in BMC Remedyforce

Note the following points that highlight the behavior of the out-of-the-box surveys:

You can create only one survey for incidents and one for service requests.
Survey links are sent to the client for whom an incident or service request is closed.
Survey links are sent each time an incident or service request is closed.
A client can submit a survey using a browser. Logging on to Salesforce or Self Service is not required.

Language of the survey

The surveys that you configure are sent to clients in the language that you have selected for the client on the Client page. The link to the survey that you have configured uses the language information from the Language field that is available on the Client page. If the language information is not available on the Client page, the default language of the Site Guest User Self Service (that is configured while setting up Self Service) is used.

Surveys on mobile applications

BMC Remedyforce supports sending surveys to clients who are using mobile applications. The following mobile operating systems support surveys:

Apple iPhone: 3.1.2 and later
Android: 4.2.2