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.

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

1. Determine the goals of your service desk.
2. Determine the metrics that help you measure success of those 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.
3. After making a list of your business goals and related key 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

When you add custom questions in a survey, note the following points:

• Questions are added as fields in the Survey object.
• BMC recommends that you use the Field Label field to save the key metrics and the Help Text field to save the questions that appear in the survey.
• The Help Text field enables you to save questions of up to 255 characters.
• Use the Field Label field to store key metrics that appear in reports and provide data for the metrics against which you are measuring client responses.
• If you use the Field Label field to store the key metric and the Help Text field to store the question, select the Use Help Text values, not Field Label, as survey questions check box on the Remedyforce Administration > Application Settings > Survey page.

For more information about adding questions, see Adding questions to a survey.

After adding questions, go to the Remedyforce Administration > Application Settings > Survey page and preview your survey page. You can also customize the survey behavior by using the settings provided on this page. Also, links to other required configurations are provided on this page. For more information about these settings, see To configure survey settings.

When the survey is ready, you must configure the workflows and email templates to link the required email template to the survey and provide the survey URL in the email templates. If you want to use custom email templates, link the custom email template with the workflow and ensure that you provide the survey URL in the template. For more information about the survey link used in the email template, see Configuring out-of-the-box surveys.

With these configurations complete, a link to the survey is sent to clients when an incident or service request raised by them is closed. However, you can configure workflows to send surveys to selected clients and at a scheduled frequency. You can view the client feedback in the Dashboards tab. For more information, see Viewing survey reports.

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 all clients 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
• BlackBerry Smartphone: 10.0