If you first subscribed to CIOPulse after June 2021, or your transactional survey URL begins with https://survey.cio-pulse.com/?tc=ts, you are already using our new survey engine and no action is required.
To use our new survey engine, you will have to change the transactional survey URL in the survey invitation email template of your customer support software.
It is a simple change, but we cannot do it for you.
Until you make this change, you will be using our old survey engine, which runs on Typeform. Our old engine will be turned off on 28 November 2021.
If you issue a survey invitation email with the old URL before 28 November, but your customer does not click on the URL until after 28 November, the old survey URL will not work. We therefore recommend you implement this change at least a week before the 28 November deadline.
Introduction
When we launched CIOPulse, we ran our surveys on a SaaS survey engine called Typeform. When one of your customers completes a survey, they are doing it on Typeform. When a survey is submitted with Typeform, the response is immediately transferred from Typeform (which runs on Amazon AWS in the USA) to CIOPulse (running in Sydney, Australia).
On 23 May 2021, we released an in-house version of the Transactional Survey, removing the need to use Typeform for Transactional Surveys. Before the end of 2021, we'll also build in-house versions of the Relationship and the Compliments, Complaints and Suggestions (CCS) surveys. Our goal is to have all three of our listening posts running entirely in-house.
The design of the three surveys will not noticeably change. But to use our new engine you will have to change the survey URLs provided to your customers in the survey invitation email.
You will have to change your transactional (ticket) survey URL before 28 November. You will have to make this change, we are unable to do it for you.
If you are using our Relationship and CCS surveys, you will not have to change these URLs until the middle of 2022.
Please read this article for more information and contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions.
Your transactional survey URL must be changed by 28 November 2021, which is when we will be turning off Typeform for transactional surveys.
We have not yet determined a date for turning off the Typeform Relationship and CCS surveys, but it is likely that it won't be until Q2 2022.
Until 28 November, your customers will be able to complete transactional surveys with both the Typeform engine and the new in-house engine.
Benefits of the new Survey Engine
The new survey engine has a number of benefits (click the heading for more info):
Our old survey engine runs on Typeform on Amazon AWS in North Virginia, USA. When a survey is completed by a customer, their response is immediately transferred to our server in Sydney, Australia. For redundancy reasons, the original response remains on AWS for up to seven days before we delete it.
With our new survey engine, survey responses are immediately saved on our server in Sydney, Australia. If your business is based in Australia, this may satisfy the data sovereignty concerns of your IS team.
Surveys running on our new survey engine are entirely navigable using the keyboard (no mouse required) and have hidden explanatory text that is read out by screen-readers to assist the visually impaired.
Your customers can complete surveys running on our new survey engine using double-byte character sets, such as Chinese and Korean.
Rather than including a survey hyperlink in your survey invitation emails, the new survey engine enables you to include the rating scale within the survey invitation email itself. This makes completing the survey a little quicker and easier and has been found to increase response rates.
Q1 of both the transactional survey and the relationship/project survey request a rating on an eleven-point scale. With the new survey engine, we can display this eleven-point scale as eleven icons rather than as a number scale.
It is not currently possible to have an icon-scale if you want to embed Q1 in your survey invitation emails. In this case, a number-scale is still required.
The new survey engine enables you to include any parameter in the survey URL within the text of the survey, for example the ticket number.
The parameter does not have to be one of the required parameter names in the survey URL, e.g. you could use &name=Sanjay in the URL and we can then include that &name value in the text of the survey.
The old survey URL allows you to tag a survey response with a single Customer Segment, e.g. &sgid=Sales OR &sgid=London. The new survey allows you to tag a survey response with two segments. For example:
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&sgid1=SalesAND&sgid2=London(business function and location); - or,
&sgid1=SalesAND&sgid2=Incidents(business function and support type); - or
&sgid1=OperationsAND&sgid2=Purchasing(business function and sub-function); - or
&sgid1=OperationsAND&sgid2=Management(business function and personnel type).
Both these Segments will then be available on all displays, reports and dashboards.
We are currently working on updating all our displays, reports and dashboards to display the new, second Segment. We expect this work to be complete in November 2021.
The old survey runs on a SaaS platform called Typeform. As a result we are beholden to Typeform's technical change management practices. In the past this has resulted in changes being made without us being aware, insufficient notice periods for upcoming maintenance, and sub-optimal communication during outages. By bringing the survey engine in-house, we now have full control of change management.
Currently, if you want to make any changes to your surveys, we have to do it for you. By bringing the survey in-house, we will be able to provide you with the ability to make your own changes to your survey design within the Portal. We expect this feature to be available in 2022.
Benefits 5 (using an icon-scale rather than a number-scale), 6 (using URL parameters in the survey text), and 9 (self-managing your survey design) are available on our Corporate and Enterprise plans.
If your current survey design includes your company logo and your corporate colours/images, you are on a Corporate or Enterprise Plan. Otherwise you are on our Business Plan.
We are getting reports of clients more than doubling their survey response rate when they embed Q1 of the survey in their survey invitation emails.
Changing your Transactional Survey URL
To start using the new survey engine for transactional surveys, you have to change the URL in the survey invitation email template of your customer support software. The new survey URL has this format (this is just an example, the exact characters in the URL will differ for you):
https://survey.cio-pulse.com/?tc=ts&sc=ABC123&cpc=DEF456&tid=99999&rgid=rrrrr&agid=aaaaa&cid=ccccc&sgid1=sssss&sgid2=ggggg
To get your exact survey URL, visit the Portal and click on the 'View your URLs' link under the 'Information Hyperlinks' heading.
At the top of the page you will see the URLs for your three listening posts. The description of each listening post will be prefixed with "TS" for Transactional Survey, "RS" for Relationship Surveys, and "CCS" for Compliments, Complaints and Suggestions. The URL we are interested in begins with "TS".
You should see the text "Email embed code: small medium large" below your transactional survey URL. In the unlikely event that this text is missing, do not proceed without first contacting us at [email protected].
Your new survey URL starts with the string of characters to the left of &tid= (e.g. https://survey.cio-pulse.com/?tc=ts&sc=ABC123&cpc=DEF456 in the example above).
All the other characters in your transactional survey URL (from &tid= onwards) remain exactly the same as they are in your existing survey URL (although see 'A second Segment parameter' below).
The new survey URL shown in 'View your URLs' has a parameter called &sgid1=. For backwards compatibility purposes, &sgid= is a synonym for this parameter and will also work. You can use either parameter name when specifying a Segment.
Your new survey URL contains a parameter called cpc=. If your old survey URL included the cpc= parameter, you may notice that the value for cpc= is different in the new URL. This is normal.
A second Segment parameter
The new transactional survey URL contains a new optional parameter, &sgid2=. This enables you to tag surveys with two Segments: one in &sgid= (or &sgid1=, which is a synonym) and one in &sgid2=. For example, you could use &sgid= (or &sgid1=) for the customer's location and &sgid2= for their business unit.
Codes and descriptions for both Segment 1 and Segment 2 are maintained in a single list in the Customer Segments function of the Portal.
We are still working on support for this second Segment, so we not yet able to store or report on it. But if you are interested in capturing a second Segment in future, you could add it to your survey URL now so that you do not have to make any further changes to your URL in future.
You can add a second Segment parameter to your URL now, using the &sgid2= parameter. Any information passed in this parameter will be lost until we finish the software development required to support it (ETA November 2021).
Testing the new survey URL
To test the new survey without saving the survey to the database, you can append &discard to the end of the URL and the survey won't be saved.
If you want to actually test that the surveys are being saved to the database properly, don't use the &discard parameter. We can delete those test surveys for you instead. Just email the submit date(s) and ticket number(s) of the test surveys you want deleted to [email protected].
Before going live with the new URL, we recommend you examine the new survey closely to ensure the wording matches the old Typeform version.