What is a Relationship Survey?
Service Delivery Teams are able to use CIOPulse to collect and analyse customer feedback via three distinct listening posts: transactional (feedback as tickets are closed); ad-hoc (complaints, compliments and suggestions); and relationship (periodic and project-based feedback).
Relationship surveys are typically used in two different ways:
- To collect feedback on how you're doing as a service provider, e.g. annual "How satisfied are you with IT?" surveys.
- During or after individual projects, e.g. "How satisfied are you with the Oracle 18 project?".
The resulting insights are great for informing your service improvement plans and project delivery capability.
You can use the Relationship Survey capability to get overall feedback on you as a service provider, or on individual projects.
What does a Relationship Survey look like?
Relationship surveys are 3-question Net Promoter surveys. Unlike your transactional and CCS (ad-hoc) surveys, the wording of Question 1 can be changed based on the topic you are asking your customers to provide feedback on.
You can see what a relationship looks like with this test URL:
https://survey.cio-pulse.com/rs?stc=djTP6A&discard&bun=IT
Your relationship survey URL will be different from the example above and can be found via the View your URLs function in the Portal.
Just like your two other listening posts, you cannot add or remove any questions, or change the rating scale of Q1.
The &bun= parameter in your survey URL is used to specify what you're asking your customer to rate their satisfaction with.
For example, if you specify &bun=IT, Q1 of the survey will ask "How would you rate your satisfaction with IT?".
If you specify &bun=the%20Windows%2010%20Rollout%20Project, Q1 of the survey will ask, "How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the Windows 10 Rollout Project?".
If you are on our Corporate or Enterprise Plans you are entitled to a relationship survey that matches your corporate branding. Typically, your relationship survey will have the same look-and-feel as your transactional survey. If this is the first time you will be using CIOPulse to run a relationship survey, please let us know so that we can set up your branded survey for you.
Sending survey invitations
Before sending out Relationship Survey invitations you first need to create a Relationship Survey record for the Survey Responses to be associated with, e.g. Annual Survey 2019 or VIP Stakeholders Quarter 1. You can then view and analyse the results for each Relationship Survey.
Survey invitations for a Relationship Survey can be sent out in two different ways:
- Automated. You define an Automated Survey Series, specifying who you want to survey and how often. CIOPulse will then automatically create a Relationship Survey for you at the required interval and send out invitations to an uploaded list of customers.
- Manual. You create a Relationship Survey record yourself, as required, and send out survey invitations using your own email system, usually via a Mail Merge.
Automated and Manual Relationship Surveys are described in their own articles: Manual Relationship Surveys and Automatic Relationship Surveys.
Survey Series
Survey Series provide a way of grouping Surveys together so their results can be compared on the Surveys in a Series dashboard , e.g. to compare successive years of annual IT surveys against each other (e.g. Annual Survey 2018, Annual Survey 2019, Annual Survey 2020), or compare the results of the quarterly VIP Stakeholder survey (VIP Q1, VIP Q2, VIP Q3).
Survey Series are managed from the Main Menu of the Portal.
There are two different types of Survey Series - Automated and Manual.
Create an Automated Series when you'd like CIOPulse to create Relationship Surveys for you at a defined interval (e.g. Every 90 days, or on the last Friday of every month) AND send out survey invitations for each survey. When it's time to send out a survey, the Automated Series automatically creates the Relationship Survey for you, associates it with the Series, and sends out the invitations.
Manual Series are used to group surveys that you want to manage manually. This is best explained by an example. Let's say you want to create a Relationship Survey to get feedback for Project X throughout its lifecyle. You want to send the invitations to various stakeholders using your own email system i.e. CIOPulse is not going to send the invitations for you. To do this, you'd create a Manual Series called "Project X". Whenever you want to send out a survey for Project X, you'd create a Relationship Survey, e.g. "Project X - October 2019", set the Series to "Project X" and then send out invitations to your stakeholders. When you next want to run the survey, you create another Relationship Survey, e.g. "Project X - December 2019", set the Series to "Project X" and then send out the invitations.
Regardless of how Relationship Series have been created, CIOPulse provides reports and dashboards that let you see the results of each individual survey and of all the surveys that belong to the same Series.
Automated Relationship Surveys are automatically associated with the Survey Series that created them.
With automated surveys, CIOPulse creates the Relationship Survey record at the same time that it sends out the corresponding survey invitations.
Manual Relationship Surveys have to be assigned to a Survey Series when you create the Relationship Survey.
If you don't want your manual survey to be part of a Survey Series, you can assign it to 'No series'.
The diagram below shows you the relationship between Survey Series and Relationship Surveys.
Survey invitation email example
The following short and to-the-point email subjects are examples of email subjects that are more likely to get the email opened rather than deleted:
- 3 minute survey on what you think of IT
- Tell us what you think – 3 minute survey
- How are we doing? 3 minute survey
- How do you feel about IT? Take 3 minutes to tell us what you think
Here's an example of the body of a relationship survey invitation email. We encourage you to experiment with different copy and to make sure the language suits your corporate style:
Hi Sam
Our ambition is to be the best IT team you’ve ever had. We know we’ve got a way to go.
To help us get there, it would be great if you could take just a few minutes to tell us where we're doing okay and where you need us to improve.
Please just click here to complete this three-question survey by Saturday 30 September.
We’re going to analyse all the feedback we receive and use it to shape our improvement plans. We’ll share what we learn with you in October.
Regards,
Charlie Chip
CIO